25 April 2014

Psalm 136; Exod. 13:1-2,11-16; 1 Cor. 15:51-58; Luke 24:1-12

The rules concerning first born males of all animal life, including human life, are given.  All of life is meant to be consecrated to the Lord.  The firstborn of every living creature is to be sacrificed to the Lord except humans and donkeys.  Why are donkeys singled out for special treatment?  Donkeys usually give birth to only one foal at a time and therefore to kill the one offspring would be wasteful of a valuable animal.  (Horses were not kept by the Jews at this time.)  Therefore, a lamb was sacrificed as a redemption for the life of a donkey.  There were to be constant reminders, frontlets before the eyes, of all God had done for His people and the practice of sacrifice and redemption of the first born of all animals was to be a reminder of the first Passover.  Circumcision was a reminder for the entire life of a man that the covenant passed through that organ's productivity to his offspring.  God has a connection with all of life, nothing is unconsecrated.  Everything serves His purpose if we are His.

In Luke's retelling of the resurrection, the women are at the tomb for a purpose.  They have prepared for the act of preparing Jesus' body for burial.  There was not time for such work on the day of His crucifixion, Passover began at sundown and His death was about that time.  In this act they are choosing love over everything else.  Identification with Jesus will make them complete outcasts in Judaism, but they come this morning for love.  Luke tells us they found the stone already rolled away in contrast to Matthew's Gospel which says it rolled away when an earthquake happened.  Luke also has two men, not one, who are clearly angels, who tell the women of resurrection.  The women tell the apostles what they have seen and heard but the apostles believe it to be an idle tale, something women might make up.  Peter, however, decides to see for himself and peeks into the tomb and goes away marveling.  Did he believe?

We are His people. We are redeemed.  These are the words we say in the Kenyan liturgy.  To be "His people" is to be redeemed.  From what, though, are we redeemed?  We are redeemed, Paul says, from the law of sin and death.  Jesus' crucifixion, His willing sacrifice of Himself,  is the price of our redemption and just as they were redeemed from Egypt and given the land flowing with milk and honey, we are redeemed from death and given eternal life.  Death no longer has sting if we know it is not the final word.  We need not fear either death or judgment because of Jesus.  Our redeemer lives.  What a difference a week can make.

24 April 2014

Psalm 146, 147; Exod. 13:3-10; 1 Cor. 15:41-50; Matt. 28:16-20

The Feast of Unleavened Bread is to remember that the Lord delivered the nation from Egypt.  It begins on Passover evening and they can eat only matzo during the next seven days.  Leaven from Egypt was something that had to be gotten rid of by the people.  They were going to a land flowing with milk and honey and yet in that land they were to keep this feast.  Denial of desire is an important discipline for us and yet we rarely keep such disciplines today.  The calendar of the Jews, put in place by Yahweh, enforces that discipline several times a year, here, for instance and in the feast of booths which commemorates the time they spent living in the wilderness.  The lesson of denial is that we are able to say no to things of the world and yes to Him alone.  We were created as more than a set of desires.

The Great Commission is our mandate to spread the Gospel wherever we go.  We have spent many years making members and not disciples.  We have not taught people to obey all that Jesus commanded.  The important thing is to teach obedience to Jesus' commands and we have left off that very thing.  We have been satisfied with a confession of faith without measuring growth and fruit.  The ability to obey all that is commanded sets us apart from the rest of creation.  My dogs can do some simple things like sit, lie down, and stay but they don't do those things absent my presence and command.  We are to be those who hear, know and do the commands of God when appropriate.  We can size up a situation and know what to do because the Word dwells within us.  Obedience is to be second nature to us but only if we practice the discipline of both no and yes.

We are not only bodies.  Adam may have come from dust and to dust he shall return but within him was given the breath of life, the spirit, the "nephesh" in Hebrew.  Later commentators will see that the life of mankind is different from the life of animals and will find something they refer to as the "neshamah" in Hebrew, that part of the spirit or soul which relates to intellect and awareness of God.  This allows us to rise above natural instinct and make informed choices, gives us the ability to say "no" to the fulfillment of desire and "yes" to the command of God.  Paul says these bodies will pass away as they are, quite literally, of earth, but the life we have in Jesus, the soul of a man infused with the Holy Spirit, will inherit eternity.  All we need for life, both here and now, is a gift of grace because of what Jesus has done for us.

23 April 2014

Psalm 97, 99; Exod. 12:40-51; 1 Cor. 15:29-41; Matt. 28:1-16

Did you notice this sentence: "It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations."  What does it mean?  The Lord is watching over Israel, those who have smeared or anointed their doorposts with the blood of the sacrificial lamb.  He watches as the angels assigned to the task of killing the firstborn of the Egyptians do their work.  The Jewish interpretation and belief is that now that the Lord has redeemed them, watching over them as they slept this night, they now are commanded to keep a night of watching as well on this night.  The night is to be given over to the observance as commanded in the rest of this passage, remembering the work the Lord has done.  If anyone falls asleep during this and cannot be awakened by speaking their name, in other words if they are heavily sleeping, then the observance is ended.  They are waiting for redemption as well.  The belief is that this night will also be when the second redemption happens and they are to wait on it.  Think about Jesus in the garden with the disciples and they fall asleep, it is then, when they are not easily awakened, that the hour has come, Passover has ended, redemption is nigh, the hour has come for the suffering and death of the firstborn.

The women have observed the Sabbath by waiting until the morning after before going to the tomb.  They have such love for Him that they go as soon as possible and when they arrive they experience an earthquake, the stone is rolled away and an angel sits upon it.  Their waiting has been rewarded, the redemption that all await has come in the resurrection of Jesus but only these two women see it.  The first ones to whom Jesus reveals Himself are women of all people, whose testimony was only worth anything to the extent a man could corroborate it in court.  The first person to whom Jesus revealed Himself in His life seems to have been the woman at the well in Samaria and the first person to whom God revealed His plan was a woman, another Mary, Jesus' mother.  Here, these women are told to go and tell the disciples to go to Galilee where He will meet them, confirming the word the angel spoke.  The disciples believe and go.  The Jews have a problem, how to explain what happened to the body.  They know that no one will believe the truth, the lie is far more believable.  Why would the guards agree?  Were their hearts that hardened?

Paul is not commending the practice of being baptized for the dead, only pointing to the practice in support of the belief in resurrection.  If the dead are not raised, what would be the point of anyone practicing such things?  Belief in resurrection and eternal life is, in fact, quite common.  Even non-believers today have notions of immortality of the soul.  Nearly all world religions believe in some form of eternal life, it is the hope of all flesh that this life is not all there is.  Their practices, like baptism on behalf of the dead, don't accomplish anything, but Paul is only pointing to the belief and its persistent hope.  His other point is that the bodies we now have are not the bodies we will have.  This body must die as it is tainted by sin.  We will receive a more durable, stronger, more powerful body in the resurrection.  Praise be to God!

22 April 2014

Psalm 103; Exod. 12:28-39; 1 Cor. 15:12-28; Mark 16:9-20

Apparently this Pharaoh wasn't a firstborn.  We are told that the firstborn of all Egypt, including Pharaoh's household, those who were in prison, even the firstborn of the livestock, were struck down this night but we have the same Pharaoh.  At midnight the plague of death strikes every household in the land and in the night the Lord awakens Moses and Aaron to lead the people out.  Do the people go into the land of Egypt from Goshen in order to ask their Egyptian hosts/slavemasters for their lovely parting gifts?  The Egyptians will do anything to get them to leave, they know that this is the God of the Hebrews doing.  For their part the people take the booty they are given and put their other possessions on their backs and leave, about 600,000 men in all not including women and children.  In 430 years they have greatly increased in Egypt.

This ending conflicts with the way the Gospel ends in verse 8.  You can see at the top of the reading that this passage is one of the most disputed passages in the New Testament.  It does not appear in the earliest manuscripts.  The Gospel seems to end with the women not telling anyone for fear.  This begins by saying Mary Magdalene alone saw Jesus that morning and then told everyone else, exactly what Matthew's Gospel says.  Then we get two verses that harmonize with the end of Luke's Gospel, the disciples on the road to Emmaus though here we get only the barest detail.  Then, we get the verses that speak of handling snakes and drinking poison that some in our region have taken as prescriptive rather than descriptive.  Paul has a snake bite in Acts that becomes a sign to unbelievers and who knows what torture early Christians were subjected to whether poison might be something they had to endure.  The other thing we see here is this, "Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation."  That was St Francis' motivation to preach not only to humans but to the rest of creation.  I wonder why the snake handlers don't follow that example.

If the Gospel is not that Christ is raised from the dead it is not the Gospel.  To strip out the resurrection from Christianity or to define it in some way other than physical is to lessen the impact and lose the Gospel.  The body is important in the resurrection, not just the Spirit.  If it were simply a spiritual resurrection Jesus would not have eaten nor would He have invited Thomas to touch His hands and His side.  The body matters because redemption includes both body and spirit. Our bodies are the means through which the Gospel is preached and it is a reminder of the incarnation and indwelling life of Christ.  If the resurrection were only spiritual then we would have a philosophical dilemma that is ruled out in all the epistles about the body's relationship to the world.  Is the body a temple as Paul says or is it meaningless and only fleshly so therefore we have freedom to literally do anything with it because it doesn't matter in the salvation equation?  The answer is that we have the life of Christ now, not simply when we pass from this body of death. 

21 April 2014

Psalm 93, 98; Exod. 12:14-27; 1 Cor. 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

Doesn't the penalty for leaven in the house seem a bit stiff?  If you have leaven in your house you shall be cut off from Israel.  It represents the leaven of Egypt that was to be gotten rid of prior to the Exodus from that land, a fresh start.  It is often interpreted as getting rid of pride, that which puffs up, the role of leaven in baking.  Jesus and Paul both use leaven and the ridding of leaven as analogies in their teaching.  During Passover all things are being made new, it is time for putting off the old in order to receive the new and leaven has to be removed from the house.  Leaven is corruption in some rabbinic teaching, that the evil inclination, the yetzer hara is that which corrupts the dough of our lives.  Lent is our own version of ridding our lives of the old leaven to prepare ourselves to receive the news of the resurrection of Jesus afresh.  The observance of Passover was an ordinance for all time in Judaism, the remembrance of what the Lord did for them in Egypt, the current remembrance that the Lord was good and the looking forward to the redemption of the world.

It would be impossible to imagine what these women felt this day.  They had prepared all the spices and anointing oil with heavy hearts.  They knew that they were going to do an awful task. Jesus' body would have been a mess from the beatings He had received.  They had waited until it was permissible to come to the tomb, Sabbath had ended, dawn was breaking.  They expected to find the tomb guarded by soldiers who would likely not be interested in their being there, much less entering the tomb to care for the body of the insurrectionist and blasphemer who had been crucified.  Still, their love for Jesus was such that they came this morning when no one else, not even His disciples, knew what to do.  These women didn't care if they identified with this man whom others had so misjudged and mistreated.  They were outcasts and they were unconcerned about what anyone else thought of them, they knew what Jesus had done for them and that was all that mattered.  When they arrived, though, the stone was rolled away, obstacle one taken care of but who did it?  A young man is there an nothing else and he says, "He is risen."  What in the world could all this mean.  No wonder they left in fear and said nothing to anyone.  How could they tell anyone what they saw and heard, no one would believe them.

Paul says the Corinthians are to always be mindful and faithful to the Gospel he preached to them and that Gospel is simply, "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures."  The rest of his words are only that this resurrection was proven by Jesus' appearing to a good many people, not just the disciples, and ultimately to Paul, one who was born out of time.  Jesus appeared to Paul in the road to Damascus when he heard the voice from heaven say, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."  Paul knew from that moment on that if he were to live it was only by grace.  He had to get rid of the old leaven of the law and make room for the new leaven of grace.  He did so gladly, no matter the cost to Himself.  If the women told no one, Paul told everyone.  He believed.