A WORD FOR TODAY, March 17, 2021
Peggy Hoppes
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Blessings. Peg
A WORD FOR TODAY, March 17, 2021
Scriptures for March 21, 2021, Fifth Sunday of Lent: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 119:9-16; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:[32-34] 35-45
“‘But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ says Yahweh: ‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” Jeremiah 31:33, WEB
We do a lot of things wrong. We lie, we cheat, and we steal. Sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. We are jealous of our neighbors and covet what they have. We may seem to be living a good, righteous life; our neighbors may think we are kind and generous, moral and upstanding citizens. And perhaps we are. Yet we still do a lot of things wrong. We don’t always love. We sometimes hate. We don’t share everything we have. We are, at times, selfish. We get angry for all the wrong reasons. We do not forgive. We forget to do what is right. We sin in thought, word and deed by what we have done and by what we have left undone. That’s our human nature: we are sinners and we do a lot of things wrong.
We know that we do things wrong because of the covenant God made with His people. The Ten Commandments gave us a foundation on which to build the lives God wants us to live. We are meant to follow those rules. We are commanded to honor our father and mother and all authority. We are commanded not to kill, commit adultery, steal, lie or covet. Most of us can do a pretty good job at checking off these commands and perhaps we are doing things right according to the letter of the Law. I don’t know any murderers, although I know people who have wished others dead. I know people who have committed adultery, but I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t lusted over some sexy body. Jesus once told the crowds that it isn’t enough to avoid doing the things that God has commanded against: He said that we shouldn’t even think about them.
The Commandments, and the rest of the Torah, help us see what we are doing wrong so that we might try to live a better life. The covenant God made with His people at Sinai demands that they live accordingly or He will turn His back on the nation. Each of us has learned in our own way how hard it is to live by those laws and how we suffer when we don’t. We’ve experienced broken relationships, sickness and even death because of our failure.
In today’s scriptures, however, we learn that there is a new covenant. Jeremiah writes God’s word, “...not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant of mine they broke, although I was a husband to them...” The first covenant given through Abraham had to do with flesh and blood and land. God promised to make them a great nation, to guard them and to prosper them. He took them by the hand as Moses led them out of slavery into a new homeland. He promised that if they continued to live in the commandments, He would be with them.
God promised a new, better covenant through Jeremiah. This is a more personal covenant. It is not given to the nation as a whole, it is give to individuals. It is a covenant that has no ifs, no conditions. It is a covenant that does not require good works or right living. It is a covenant that can’t be broken because it is fulfilled and finished by God Himself.
God was available to His people from the beginning of time. We hear in the scriptures that He can be seen in the creation, in blooming flowers and magnificent sunsets. His strength can be seen in the high mountains and His power in the rolling ocean. Yet, God has always had a special relationship with humankind. This is especially true beginning with the Patriarchs, Abraham and his offspring. The Old Testament stories show us how God interacted with His people, making covenant promises and guiding their footsteps. He gave them the Law, anointed their leaders and led them to a Promised Land. In those stories we can see that certain people had a special relationship with God, like Moses and David and the prophets. They had God’s Spirit; those special people were given the task to lead and teach God’s chosen nation. They were mediators between God and His people.
The people didn’t mind having a go-between. They were afraid of hearing God’s voice for themselves; they were afraid of seeing God’s glory. They thought they would die if they did. So, God appointed those special people and filled them with His Spirit to speak on His behalf. Yet, having someone to teach and lead did not make it easier for them to stay in a right relationship with God. They fell hard and they fell often, doing their own thing and going their own way. They chased false gods and disobeyed the commands. It didn’t help when their leaders and teachers did not walk the talk; it was often those on whom the people relied who led them down the wrong path.
Jeremiah wrote, “‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will no longer each teach his neighbor, and every man teach his brother, saying, “Know Yahweh;” for they will all know me, from their least to their greatest,’ says Yahweh: ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more,’” This covenant promises that God will be dwell in each of our hearts, writing His Word on the very depths of our souls. This new covenant is not about obedience, it is about God changing His people so that they will live naturally according to His will.
God promised that one day our relationship with Him would work in a whole new way. In that day everyone would have the Spirit of God in their hearts and in their lives. Instead of pushing them from the outside, God’s Word would drive them from the inside. They need not fear God’s Word; they could study and know God for personally. They could hear Him and follow Him without the need for someone to do it for them.
This does not mean that there will be no teachers or leaders. We are a community of believers who need one another. Others can help us to learn and grow and mature in our faith. We need one another, to keep each other accountable to the true Word of God, to keep from interpreting God’s Word to meet our own desires. In giving us the Spirit, God does not reject teachers and leaders. But God has made it possible for us to know Him, to discern who is speaking His Word rightly. We can hear His voice and respond to our own personal call to faithful living.
Online ministry was an eye opening experience for me. I grew up in my neighborhood church, knew the Bible as it was preached and taught by my pastors and others. As I grew older, of course, I began to look more deeply into the scriptures for myself, and though I learned new things I never wandered very far from the understanding that I’d been taught as a child. I discovered in those online chat rooms that there are a million different ways that people understand the Bible. I think I have run into every one of them during my online wanderings. Some of our differences are minor and are based on personal and unique perspectives. We look at every text through our own experience, culture, gender, and age. We all know that His Word even speaks to us differently at different times of our lives. This is what makes the Bible God’s living Word: He speaks to us individually through every word.
Sometimes, however, there are people who see God’s Word in a way that we might even be able to call it heretical. All too many believe they have been given “special knowledge” of the scriptures. When asked to clarify, too many of these self-proclaimed prophets will say, “Ask the Spirit to reveal it to you.” If you don’t get it, they suggest that you just aren’t gifted. They refuse to answer and act superior because they have this special knowledge. They find it very difficult to cope in a regular congregation of believers. Their ideas are so different and their attitude so haughty that they find fault with everything and everybody. They refuse to accept what others have to say so they create their own fellowships and appoint themselves as leaders.
I’ve talked about one such woman several times in this devotional. She was taking courses on how to be a prophet and she started a house church where she was preaching to a few followers. She respected me based on what she’d heard in the chat rooms and asked me to read one of her sermons. The sermon was so full of error that it made me concerned for those attending her meetings. She misquoted the scriptures, misidentified the passages, and her interpretations were questionable because she was mixing ideas and themes from completely unrelated texts. She asked for my opinion, so I gave her a few notes as graciously as I could, but she was offended by my response. She answered me with a warning that she was one of God’s prophets and I should beware.
I don’t know what happened to her, but I do know she was not a prophet called by God. She was self-appointed and she twisted God’s Word. She called me a prophet, too, until I didn’t gush over her preaching. Unfortunately, she was unteachable. Even the most educated among the people of God need to willingly listen to others because we are all sinners. The very things that make us unique can cause us to misunderstand God’s Word. We need one another and we need to be teachable. We have to be in communication with other faithful people to hear God’s Word and to know what He is calling us to do in our world. Perhaps that was the woman’s biggest problem: she disconnected from the Church God has given to us to help us grow and mature in faith. She went her own way.
Imagine what it must have been like for those early Christians. They were faithful Jews, and the Way seemed so strange. Yet, they believed in Jesus. They must have worried, at least a little bit, that they were walking a dangerous path. As a matter of fact, there was a resurgence of the Jewish faith during the time when the book of Hebrews was written. They questioned whether or not “The Way” was real or acceptable. They struggled; many Jews and pagans returned to their roots. The writer of Hebrews, however, tells us that Jesus was not like that woman online. He was not self-appointed. He was identified as the Son of God by God’s own voice. He was not doing His own will but the will of His Father. He was obedient; He was glorified not by what He did, but what God did for and through Him. He was Priest and King not because He decided he wanted to be, but because God promised that He would be.
We don’t choose our calling. We simply choose whether or not we will be obedient to the will and purpose of God. In doing so, we receive all that He has promised. There are times when I worry that I’m self-appointed. Do I do what I do because God has called me to this ministry or because I have chosen this path to suit my own desires?
I can imagine that all those that were specially chosen in the Old Testament asked themselves similar questions. We know that Abraham went his own way over and over again. Moses argued with God. David disobeyed the commandments. Yet, we also know that they had a heart for God and were gifted with His Spirit. They were also teachable.
David was chosen to be king of Israel because God could see that his heart was in the right place. God doesn’t look for the strongest, or the most intelligent, or the most beautiful people to do His work; He looks for those who love Him and trust in His promises. David was a man like that, but he was also a sinner.
David believed in God and sought God’s mercy and grace. He sinned against others: against Uriah and Bathsheba. He even sinned against his people because he lied to them and he stole one of their own from their midst. But David understood the reality of our sin: no matter what we do, no matter whether or not our sin is “victimless’” or affects a nation, our sin is against the Lord. When we do what is wrong, we break our relationship with God. Even from birth we are broken and in need of God’s grace. We are saints and sinners, righteous by God’s grace, yet still capable of sinning against God and one another. It seems contradictory, but it is the reality of our existence.
So we, like the psalmist, ask how to we can keep our way pure? God has given us a path to follow. He’s given us a book to read. He has placed His word in our hearts so that we will be strengthened to be all that He has created and called us to be. We are righteous in our hearts because of what Christ has done, and because of Jesus we can seek God despite our failings. We beg that He will help us walk rightly, that He will teach us to do that which will glorify Him in the world. Jesus obeyed unto death, glorifying God on the cross. By His grace we can at least treasure the Word He has placed in our hearts and constantly seek what that Word means in our daily lives.
Each verse in Psalm 119 refers to some different aspect of God’s Law: the spoken Word of God, the obligations of faith, the promise, the teachings, the rules, the judgment, the rituals and the authority each have a place in our life. When we are obedient we will find a life blessed by God's graciousness. It won’t earn us eternal life, but it will help us to live a life that glorifies God in this world as we wait for the promise He has won for us.
The answer to the psalmist’s question is to obey God’s divine spoken Word. We can look for Him in our religious obligations. We must keep His promise close to our heart so that we won’t turn from Him and do what is wrong. We can seek God’s teaching on how to live properly and according to His rules. We can accept God’s judgment when we do wrong and rejoice through our worship practices. We can, and must, focus on God’s authority over our life and there we will find rest.
We do this together, helping one another be all that God has created and redeemed us to be.
The writer of Hebrews reminds us that Jesus Christ was obedient, giving up the glory of heaven to become flesh to live, serve and die for the sake of the world. “Having been made perfect, he became to all of those who obey him the author of eternal salvation...” Our obedience to God’s Word is our response to that which He did for us. The source of our salvation calls us to a life of humble service; following in His footsteps, perhaps even to our own death.
We don’t choose our calling. We simply choose whether or not we will be obedient to the will and purpose of God. In doing so, we receive all that He has promised.
James and John were important to Jesus and they were witnesses to the miraculous and incredible things He did. They immediately left their father Zebedee to follow Him. They were part of Jesus’ inner circle along with Peter; they were witnesses to the Transfiguration. They are often known as the Sons of Thunder because they asked Jesus if they should call down hellfire on a Samaritan town that rejected Him as they were going to Jerusalem. They were zealous and loyal. They believed and lived their faith passionately. They also thought they were important enough to have Jesus give them special consideration when He entered into His Kingdom. They wanted to sit at His right hand and left hand. They wanted to be on the dais with the King, sitting beside His throne.
Jesus had authority over heaven and earth but He could not fulfill their wish to have such seats of honor. The reality, which they did not yet understand, is that the seats they desired would never exist. They thought Jesus would be an earthly king like David, who would rule over Jerusalem and Israel to save the people from the oppression of the Romans. The irony here is that Jesus just finished telling the disciples that the Son of Man, Himself, had to suffer at the hands of the world and be condemned to death. He told them that He would be mocked, spit upon, flogged and killed in Jerusalem. Jesus would never sit on the type of throne they expected and desired. His throne would be a cross, and those on His right and left would be common criminals facing the same punishment for their sins. They had no idea that His cup and baptism would offer only suffering and pain. They were willing to follow Jesus anywhere, but they did not expect that it would mean following Him to a cross. They told Him they were able to follow Him. Jesus said, “You will.”
This came true for James. Just fourteen years after the Jesus’ death, James was beheaded in a lame attempt to halt Christianity. He was the first Apostle to be martyred, the only one of the eleven whose death was recorded in the scriptures. He indeed did drink the same cup and suffer the same baptism as Jesus. James boldly asked Jesus for the wrong thing, but he continued to live out his life of faith and then he died for the sake of the Gospel. We may make the same mistakes, thinking our position or our experiences merit us greater attention or honor. Jesus teaches us a different way.
Jesus called the twelve together and said, “You know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever of you wants to become first among you, shall be bondservant of all.”
Jesus was not self-appointed. He was the beloved Son sent by God. He was not following His own will but the will of His Father. Because of His obedience, God made Him Priest and King over this New Covenant. He did not choose these roles; God fulfilled His promises in Jesus. These were not earthbound titles given for a brief period of time; He is Priest and King forever.
The journey we’ve traveled during this Lenten period has helped us see, and accept, that we have truly sinned against God. We have done what we should not do and failed to do what we should do in thought, word and deed. While our sins may seem to be against our neighbors, the root of our problem is that sin keeps us separated from our God. Our failures make us unable to pay the debts we owe one another and our God. But God promised to take care of it all and He fulfilled that promise with Jesus on the cross. We do not need a priest or a king to intervene on our behalf because we have Jesus. God forgives our iniquity and forgets our sin because He was obedient.
We are still going to sin. It’s a fact of life that our flesh is weak and susceptible to temptation. Every day we will fail to do what is right. These sins are rarely anything major; we seem to be good and upright to the world. But sin is sin, and the effect of sin reaches far beyond our own lives. Though the work is complete, we still have reason to pray for God’s grace and forgiveness. We need Him to change us, to fill us with His Word.
Our Gospel passage for today is the beginning of the end for Jesus. He told the disciples that “the hour has come.” The catalyst seemed to be the arrival of some Greek believers who were in Jerusalem for the Passover. They were looking to meet with Jesus. They weren’t necessarily from Greece, but were from the Greek speaking world, which was separate from the Jewish world. Jesus was having such an impact on everyone, all the nations, that they were beginning to seek Him out. The world was ready to judge Jesus for His work.
But really, it was God that was about to judge the world for the works of fallible human beings. The “ruler of this world” was about to be defeated, not with military might but in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The world thought they were casting out a troublemaker, crucifying a rebel, but in reality God was destroying the hold of sin and death on His beloved people. We look at the story of Jesus and are saddened by the necessity of His horrific death on the cross, and yet in that very death He was glorified and God was glorified by His obedience. It seems like the end of a story we do not like, but we know the rest. We know that Easter will come. And when Easter comes, the world will see God’s grace and mercy.
We do a lot of things wrong. That’s our human nature: we are sinners and we fail to live up to God’s expectations. When we do, we can trust in God’s faithfulness to keep the New Covenant. Our Lenten journey has led us toward repentance, turning to Jesus for His forgiveness. He has led us to the point that we can delight in His statues and never forget His Word. In His great mercy and love, Jesus has provided for our reconciliation with God the Father, which then makes it possible for us to reconcile with our neighbors and all creation. He forgives us, forgets our sin and dwells in us, guiding our resurrection journey along the path He has ordained for each of us.
A WORD FOR TODAY is posted five days a week – Monday through Friday. The devotional on Wednesday takes a look at the scripture from the Revised Common Lectionary for the upcoming Sunday. A WORD FOR TODAY is posted on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Word-for-Today-Devotional/339428839418276. Like the page to receive the devotion through Facebook. For information and to access our archives, visit http://www.awordfortoday.org.
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