The call of God makes us whole
Commentary
Object:
The scriptures this week are focused on the importance of the people of God to our Creator. Luke's gospel shows us Jesus interrupting the Sabbath worship to call a woman forward so that he can cure her of a twisted, painful back. In the Old Testament lesson, Jeremiah learns that God not only is calling him to be a prophet, but also that Jeremiah had been created for just this purpose, known to God from his very conception. The passage from Hebrews talks about the terrifying encounter with God that the former Egyptian slaves had at Mount Sinai. But the writer comforts those early Christians; that mountain was fearsome, but being there was joyful as well, because they learned that God had a plan for them, a plan for joy as well as reverence. As we preach, we need to always balance those two facts about our relationship with God. There is a reason to be afraid -- we are in no way perfect enough to face God -- but there is an equal reason to be comforted: God is love and compassion.
Luke 13:10-17
"On a Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues..." In other words, Jesus was performing as a rabbi, which means that he was a recognized teacher not just by his disciples, but also by those who invited him to speak. In those days synagogues did not have a rabbi that they supported, but Bible teaching was handled by men of some learning, either known by the elders of the congregation or recommended to them. We don't know in which synagogue or city Jesus was at the time. It seems clear, however, that we are not talking about his home congregation, where he would have known the name of the woman. He has been invited to speak by the leaders of the congregation, who will be held responsible for the teaching that Sabbath.
This is undoubtedly responsible for the embarrassment on the part of the leader of the congregation at the crippled woman's appearance and the interruption it caused in the flow of the worship. This woman, who came forward at Jesus' invitation, had not, according to Luke, pushed herself forward, looking for attention. Nor does Luke portray Jesus getting into a long drawn-out ritual in the midst of the synagogue. Bent over as she was, it probably did take her some time to get to her feet and make her way to the front of the congregation, where Jesus was sitting to teach. But it probably seemed even longer, since silence would have fallen over the assembled worshipers as they watched her make her way step by step, breathing heavily due to the cramping of her lungs in her twisted frame. That walk took her from the back of the hall, amongst the women, into the midst of the men who had come to learn and discuss the Torah.
Jesus' compassion in this situation is amazing. Women sat or stood in the back of the congregation, or up in a balcony overlooking the main floor, because it was believed that men could not withstand their beauty, which would be a distraction from the worship of God. The men would not look in their direction during worship, just as they would keep their eyes down on the street, so as not to look at a woman. Yet Jesus not only saw this woman, he looked directly at her: he saw her pain and called her forward.
We might wonder what her reaction was. How long did it take before she did as she was bid? Did she wonder what he had in mind? Did she have hope of being healed? Healers were not rare in Jesus' time and place. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan says that belief in healing by wandering preachers ("magicians" as they were called) was common. So she may have had such a hope. Whatever her hopes and fears might have been, the woman came forward. Jesus' words to her were simple: "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." But what he then did was not simple -- he "put his hands on her," and she "immediately straightened up." After eighteen years of being in pain, after eighteen years of people looking at her in disdain because they considered that her infirmity was caused by "a spirit" (read "evil spirit" or "demon"), she was called forward by a great teacher, and he even touched her! So as she straightened up, she praised God. Perhaps she knew the Psalm for this Sunday, Psalm 71, and thought of the third verse:
Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go; give the command to save me for you are my rock and my fortress.
If she did, she was recognizing the source of Jesus' power, because this Psalm, as with all of the Psalms, is directed to the LORD God. So it is no wonder that the ordinary people praised God with her.
Back pain is a major factor in modern America too, accounting for millions of lost work hours every year. Even today, there are millions of people who have had a variety of electrical, surgical, and medicinal treatments for back pain, only to continue to live in pain that twists their personalities as well as their bodies. No one can live in unremitting pain over a long period of time without having a shortened temper, depression, and bouts of hopelessness. Continued back pain limits the ability of a person to work and do many of the things they have always enjoyed doing. The woman in this story has had a bad back for eighteen years. Her children grew up with her unable to lift them in her arms. Her bent-over posture made cooking over an open fire a dangerous occupation. She could not straighten up to dust away the cobwebs or hug her husband. Her life was circumscribed by her limitations.
For Luke, her praise of God is a declaration of who Jesus is, and where his power comes from. The entire first half of Luke's gospel consists of people asking who Jesus is. So it is a vital part of Luke's message that she praises God as she pulls herself upright.
The synagogue leader is, as we have already seen, embarrassed by this interruption. His embarrassment takes the form of indignation, as it does with so many of us. He doesn't want to visit his feelings on the speaker for the day, so he challenges the congregation instead.
"There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."
Apparently all the leaders of the synagogue, who sit in the front of the synagogue facing the congregation, start to nod, because Jesus' angry response is not directed just at the president of the synagogue, but with some plurality in the congregation. "You hypocrites!" he says, calling them "actors" (the meaning of the Greek hypocrites). "Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water?" he demands.
The choice of this example is an interesting one, first because he compares the woman who has benefited from his act of compassion to an ox or donkey. In the first century, women, children, oxen, and donkeys were all considered chattel, belonging to the master of the house, and living for his pleasure and use. Second, the act of untying a knot was covered under the strict rules of the day about Sabbath work -- one may tie or untie a knot that requires only one hand, but no knot that requires both hands to do the work. A simple knot would be easy for an animal to pull loose, so a firmer knot would usually be used. Yet it is permitted to untie that knot on the Sabbath, because it is to protect the animals. Third, acts of compassion are always regarded as God's own work and so are not forbidden on Sabbath. It is required that cows be milked on the Sabbath, because to not milk puts the cow in pain and risks mastitis, which can cripple a cow, leading to infection, decreased milk output, and even death to the animal. It is always permitted to treat the sick, because the relief of suffering is always permitted on the Sabbath. So the leader of the synagogue really was out of line.
But Jesus goes on to say, "Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?" Jesus refers to her as a "daughter of Abraham." Nowhere else in the scriptures is any woman referred to this way. He has first pointed out the lowly estate in which most women were considered to live, and then elevated her to an absolutely equal status with the men who are solemnly criticizing her. Furthermore, he is reminding them not just of their mutual descent from Abraham, but of the statement in Genesis 1:27 that "God created the human being in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." What statement could be more egalitarian?
The fact that Jesus was being more faithful to the Torah than the leaders of the synagogue is confirmed by Luke when he says: "When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing." Those wonderful things were both the seemingly magical works of compassion, as well as his words that "the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).
Pastors and preachers today are also sometimes faced with emergency situations in the course of a worship service. People with compromised cardiac systems, who have sat for a long uninterrupted time, will sometimes pass out when called to stand because their arteries can't pump blood to the head when body posture changes suddenly. People can also have strokes or heart attacks in the midst of the congregation. In these situations, someone has to be ready to calm the congregation, instruct someone to call emergency services, and administer first aid. All of that having been handled, the pastor now has to figure out what to do. Should the worship continue unabated? Should everything stop so the congregation can pray for the sick person? Should worship be dismissed? Can the congregation go on with worship as usual? So we can readily identify with the leader of the congregation in this story. Except, of course, we would never yell at the congregation to do this somewhere else.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Like the gospel, the Old Testament lesson talks about the preciousness of people to the God who made us, in this instance Jeremiah, son of a priest named Hilkiah. Jeremiah heard God speaking to him: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you," God said, "before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."
Not surprisingly, Jeremiah's instant reply is not positive: "I am too young, Lord! I do not know how to speak." As the son of a priest, Jeremiah knew the importance of being able to speak to people. Little does he know that everyone God has called to be a prophet has objected in much the same way, even Moses, who said to God, "Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent... I am slow of speech and tongue" (Exodus 4:10).
God reassures Jeremiah, saying, "Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you." By "them," God means the nations. Which exact nations God does not say, but this is an important point. God, who has been the God of Israel and Judah and of the Promised Land, is now seen by Jeremiah to be the God of the nations. This is in keeping with the view of the writer of Deuteronomy, who is contemporaneous with Jeremiah. Deuteronomy 18:12 says that God drove out the nations that had been living in the land and gave it to the children of Israel, because these other nations had done things that were detestable to God. God has power over those nations, even if he is not recognized as their God, and holds them accountable.
This is a major shift in Judah's image of God, and it is important to the various writers who contribute to the book of Jeremiah, because with the Exile there is fear in the people that perhaps their God has been unable to defend them, and that God has lost the war to the gods of Babylon. Or, even worse, perhaps God has given up on the covenant people he has chosen. To Jeremiah, the answer is that the people had broken the covenant, bringing on the punishment of God. The good news was that God would not punish forever, but would restore both the land and the people.
Jeremiah lived in times very similar to ours. All around us we see chaos, even in the churches. Declining membership is matched by an increase in bad behavior in our country. And when we say that this or that portion of our culture (think especially of Two and a Half Men and the blowback on the young actor who said the show was filth) is unacceptable to God, we quickly learn that the authority of Christianity has failed. Where once the Judeo-Christian ethic spoke out needing to justify or explain why some things were not acceptable, today we speak to a people who take their cues from "celebrities" who are famous for nothing, and whose manner of dress and sexual mores is not particularly uplifting. We may ask, "Where is God? Why does God do nothing about these things?" But Jeremiah's message is that God does not work directly in the world, but uses other nations, other armies, and natural disasters to make us stop and take stock of our lives and what we need to change. The fact that this is not a popular idea today is not at all different from Jeremiah's time. Later in his writings, Jeremiah describes being dropped into a cistern and left to die. But that's another story for a different Sunday.
"See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant." "You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you." If this is the call of God, then it is of paramount importance that Jeremiah -- and we too -- get it right. It is a thing to be appointed to carry the word of God to anyone, but especially to those in power.
Jeremiah was called to a ministry that was very political. In a time when Babylonia had won all of the land from the Euphrates through Egypt, there had been many wars; and social, religious, economic, and cultural life had broken down, as happens when war ravages a country. We have very little documentary evidence explaining all of the turmoil, but we do know that Judah was torn into two factions, those who favored aligning the nation with Egypt, and those who thought they should align themselves with Babylon (according to Kathleen M. O'Connor, "Jeremiah Introduction," in The New Interpreter's Study Bible). Jeremiah was called to speak to warring factions within his own country, and as time went on and war destroyed Jerusalem and the temple within it, he would be talking to people who had been personally ravaged by the wages of war, people who were now enslaved, whose children had been taken from them, who were not only homeless but were forced to live in enemy territory, working for their enemies.
Jeremiah's life and work has many similarities to Moses. Like Moses, Jeremiah was called personally by God, driven to confront kings. Each man protested their inability to speak on behalf of God. Both of their careers span forty years -- Moses leading his people through the wilderness, Jeremiah warning the nation and lamenting with them loss and exile. Both promise to the people that God will give them the Promised Land, but the people, out of fear, wind up in temporary exile before the promise of God is realized.
Today's passage ends with an interesting event that parallels Isaiah's call more than a century earlier. When God called Isaiah, who was a priest in the temple, Isaiah cried out that he was a man of unclean lips, living in a nation that was the same. So God sent a seraph (a six-winged angel) to take a burning coal from the altar with tongs and touch his lips with it, so that he would be clean. In Jeremiah's case, "the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth." This also parallels the experience of John the divine in Revelation, to whom God gives a scroll to eat, so that he can produce the words of God. As the writer of Hebrews says: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!" (Hebrews 10:31). If this is the call of God, then it is of paramount importance that we get it right.
The one thing we must not do with Jeremiah's story is to generalize from God's words to him that "before I formed you in the womb I knew you." Jeremiah is being told that he is special, set apart from the rest of us. From before his conception, God was involved in Jeremiah's life, because he had in mind his need for a prophet at the proper time. Rather than applying to every human being in the world, God is telling Jeremiah that he has been "set apart" from before the moment of conception. It goes against the sense of what God is saying to say that we all are known to God before we were formed in the womb.
Hebrews 12:18-29 This passage from Hebrews binds together the New and Old Testament readings. The speaker is using imagery from the encounter between the escapees from Egypt and the mountain of God, also called Mount Sinai. In doing so, there is not only a contrast between that very old image of the fearsomeness of the LORD and the love of God that Jesus preached; there is a new paradigm being established for the people of God.
The people of the Hebrews have traveled from Egypt, across the Sea of Reeds into the Arabian Peninsula, to the foot of a mountain that has been calling them with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. If this sounds like a vision of a volcano, that image becomes reality in the first sentence of this passage. The mountain is burning with fire and surrounded by darkness, gloom, and storm. This is a dramatic description and exactly what a volcanic eruption looks like, including the storm, because volcanoes often create electrical fields which then create lightning bolts in the cloud at the summit.
The area in which the people are walking was a hotbed of volcanic activity in the days of the Bible. Bitumen pits (like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles) were a source of asphalt for mortar and ink, which the ancients used to write the biblical documents on papyrus or vellum. The valley in which Sodom and Gomorrah were located held similar tar pits and mud volcanoes. So it should be no surprise that Mount Sinai sounds like a volcano in eruption.
Of course, this display was terrifying. Add to it the sound of a trumpet blast and the groans of the rocks themselves, and it is no stretch to think of the mountain as being alive, or at the very least harboring the God that called Moses to lead the Hebrews to this event. This is not, however, to say that there was no divine presence with Moses. It is simply to say that often God uses natural phenomena to talk to us or to make a point. It is a point of faith to accept God's work in the natural world as God's word to us.
In this instance, the mountain was truly both a mountain of fear and a mountain of joy. We ought to have fear -- in the sense of reverence -- when we come to face God. But we ought also to be joyful to meet God.
The writer of Hebrews wants us to know that Jesus makes the difference between these two views of meeting God. Just as the woman in Luke 13 was probably frightened to step out into the congregation of men, yet was hopeful of what Jesus might have in mind for her, so we approach God in trepidation (knowing, as Jeremiah knew, that we are not prepared to serve our God). Yet we can be hopeful too. We can hope that God loves us as much as Jesus says God does. And the reason we have the hope is that Jesus told his disciples he is the embodiment of God, and Jesus is compassionate, caring, and sees who we are and what we need. It is in this way that this passage ties together the Old and New Testament readings.
Luke 13:10-17
"On a Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues..." In other words, Jesus was performing as a rabbi, which means that he was a recognized teacher not just by his disciples, but also by those who invited him to speak. In those days synagogues did not have a rabbi that they supported, but Bible teaching was handled by men of some learning, either known by the elders of the congregation or recommended to them. We don't know in which synagogue or city Jesus was at the time. It seems clear, however, that we are not talking about his home congregation, where he would have known the name of the woman. He has been invited to speak by the leaders of the congregation, who will be held responsible for the teaching that Sabbath.
This is undoubtedly responsible for the embarrassment on the part of the leader of the congregation at the crippled woman's appearance and the interruption it caused in the flow of the worship. This woman, who came forward at Jesus' invitation, had not, according to Luke, pushed herself forward, looking for attention. Nor does Luke portray Jesus getting into a long drawn-out ritual in the midst of the synagogue. Bent over as she was, it probably did take her some time to get to her feet and make her way to the front of the congregation, where Jesus was sitting to teach. But it probably seemed even longer, since silence would have fallen over the assembled worshipers as they watched her make her way step by step, breathing heavily due to the cramping of her lungs in her twisted frame. That walk took her from the back of the hall, amongst the women, into the midst of the men who had come to learn and discuss the Torah.
Jesus' compassion in this situation is amazing. Women sat or stood in the back of the congregation, or up in a balcony overlooking the main floor, because it was believed that men could not withstand their beauty, which would be a distraction from the worship of God. The men would not look in their direction during worship, just as they would keep their eyes down on the street, so as not to look at a woman. Yet Jesus not only saw this woman, he looked directly at her: he saw her pain and called her forward.
We might wonder what her reaction was. How long did it take before she did as she was bid? Did she wonder what he had in mind? Did she have hope of being healed? Healers were not rare in Jesus' time and place. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan says that belief in healing by wandering preachers ("magicians" as they were called) was common. So she may have had such a hope. Whatever her hopes and fears might have been, the woman came forward. Jesus' words to her were simple: "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." But what he then did was not simple -- he "put his hands on her," and she "immediately straightened up." After eighteen years of being in pain, after eighteen years of people looking at her in disdain because they considered that her infirmity was caused by "a spirit" (read "evil spirit" or "demon"), she was called forward by a great teacher, and he even touched her! So as she straightened up, she praised God. Perhaps she knew the Psalm for this Sunday, Psalm 71, and thought of the third verse:
Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go; give the command to save me for you are my rock and my fortress.
If she did, she was recognizing the source of Jesus' power, because this Psalm, as with all of the Psalms, is directed to the LORD God. So it is no wonder that the ordinary people praised God with her.
Back pain is a major factor in modern America too, accounting for millions of lost work hours every year. Even today, there are millions of people who have had a variety of electrical, surgical, and medicinal treatments for back pain, only to continue to live in pain that twists their personalities as well as their bodies. No one can live in unremitting pain over a long period of time without having a shortened temper, depression, and bouts of hopelessness. Continued back pain limits the ability of a person to work and do many of the things they have always enjoyed doing. The woman in this story has had a bad back for eighteen years. Her children grew up with her unable to lift them in her arms. Her bent-over posture made cooking over an open fire a dangerous occupation. She could not straighten up to dust away the cobwebs or hug her husband. Her life was circumscribed by her limitations.
For Luke, her praise of God is a declaration of who Jesus is, and where his power comes from. The entire first half of Luke's gospel consists of people asking who Jesus is. So it is a vital part of Luke's message that she praises God as she pulls herself upright.
The synagogue leader is, as we have already seen, embarrassed by this interruption. His embarrassment takes the form of indignation, as it does with so many of us. He doesn't want to visit his feelings on the speaker for the day, so he challenges the congregation instead.
"There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."
Apparently all the leaders of the synagogue, who sit in the front of the synagogue facing the congregation, start to nod, because Jesus' angry response is not directed just at the president of the synagogue, but with some plurality in the congregation. "You hypocrites!" he says, calling them "actors" (the meaning of the Greek hypocrites). "Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water?" he demands.
The choice of this example is an interesting one, first because he compares the woman who has benefited from his act of compassion to an ox or donkey. In the first century, women, children, oxen, and donkeys were all considered chattel, belonging to the master of the house, and living for his pleasure and use. Second, the act of untying a knot was covered under the strict rules of the day about Sabbath work -- one may tie or untie a knot that requires only one hand, but no knot that requires both hands to do the work. A simple knot would be easy for an animal to pull loose, so a firmer knot would usually be used. Yet it is permitted to untie that knot on the Sabbath, because it is to protect the animals. Third, acts of compassion are always regarded as God's own work and so are not forbidden on Sabbath. It is required that cows be milked on the Sabbath, because to not milk puts the cow in pain and risks mastitis, which can cripple a cow, leading to infection, decreased milk output, and even death to the animal. It is always permitted to treat the sick, because the relief of suffering is always permitted on the Sabbath. So the leader of the synagogue really was out of line.
But Jesus goes on to say, "Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?" Jesus refers to her as a "daughter of Abraham." Nowhere else in the scriptures is any woman referred to this way. He has first pointed out the lowly estate in which most women were considered to live, and then elevated her to an absolutely equal status with the men who are solemnly criticizing her. Furthermore, he is reminding them not just of their mutual descent from Abraham, but of the statement in Genesis 1:27 that "God created the human being in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." What statement could be more egalitarian?
The fact that Jesus was being more faithful to the Torah than the leaders of the synagogue is confirmed by Luke when he says: "When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing." Those wonderful things were both the seemingly magical works of compassion, as well as his words that "the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).
Pastors and preachers today are also sometimes faced with emergency situations in the course of a worship service. People with compromised cardiac systems, who have sat for a long uninterrupted time, will sometimes pass out when called to stand because their arteries can't pump blood to the head when body posture changes suddenly. People can also have strokes or heart attacks in the midst of the congregation. In these situations, someone has to be ready to calm the congregation, instruct someone to call emergency services, and administer first aid. All of that having been handled, the pastor now has to figure out what to do. Should the worship continue unabated? Should everything stop so the congregation can pray for the sick person? Should worship be dismissed? Can the congregation go on with worship as usual? So we can readily identify with the leader of the congregation in this story. Except, of course, we would never yell at the congregation to do this somewhere else.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Like the gospel, the Old Testament lesson talks about the preciousness of people to the God who made us, in this instance Jeremiah, son of a priest named Hilkiah. Jeremiah heard God speaking to him: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you," God said, "before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."
Not surprisingly, Jeremiah's instant reply is not positive: "I am too young, Lord! I do not know how to speak." As the son of a priest, Jeremiah knew the importance of being able to speak to people. Little does he know that everyone God has called to be a prophet has objected in much the same way, even Moses, who said to God, "Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent... I am slow of speech and tongue" (Exodus 4:10).
God reassures Jeremiah, saying, "Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you." By "them," God means the nations. Which exact nations God does not say, but this is an important point. God, who has been the God of Israel and Judah and of the Promised Land, is now seen by Jeremiah to be the God of the nations. This is in keeping with the view of the writer of Deuteronomy, who is contemporaneous with Jeremiah. Deuteronomy 18:12 says that God drove out the nations that had been living in the land and gave it to the children of Israel, because these other nations had done things that were detestable to God. God has power over those nations, even if he is not recognized as their God, and holds them accountable.
This is a major shift in Judah's image of God, and it is important to the various writers who contribute to the book of Jeremiah, because with the Exile there is fear in the people that perhaps their God has been unable to defend them, and that God has lost the war to the gods of Babylon. Or, even worse, perhaps God has given up on the covenant people he has chosen. To Jeremiah, the answer is that the people had broken the covenant, bringing on the punishment of God. The good news was that God would not punish forever, but would restore both the land and the people.
Jeremiah lived in times very similar to ours. All around us we see chaos, even in the churches. Declining membership is matched by an increase in bad behavior in our country. And when we say that this or that portion of our culture (think especially of Two and a Half Men and the blowback on the young actor who said the show was filth) is unacceptable to God, we quickly learn that the authority of Christianity has failed. Where once the Judeo-Christian ethic spoke out needing to justify or explain why some things were not acceptable, today we speak to a people who take their cues from "celebrities" who are famous for nothing, and whose manner of dress and sexual mores is not particularly uplifting. We may ask, "Where is God? Why does God do nothing about these things?" But Jeremiah's message is that God does not work directly in the world, but uses other nations, other armies, and natural disasters to make us stop and take stock of our lives and what we need to change. The fact that this is not a popular idea today is not at all different from Jeremiah's time. Later in his writings, Jeremiah describes being dropped into a cistern and left to die. But that's another story for a different Sunday.
"See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant." "You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you." If this is the call of God, then it is of paramount importance that Jeremiah -- and we too -- get it right. It is a thing to be appointed to carry the word of God to anyone, but especially to those in power.
Jeremiah was called to a ministry that was very political. In a time when Babylonia had won all of the land from the Euphrates through Egypt, there had been many wars; and social, religious, economic, and cultural life had broken down, as happens when war ravages a country. We have very little documentary evidence explaining all of the turmoil, but we do know that Judah was torn into two factions, those who favored aligning the nation with Egypt, and those who thought they should align themselves with Babylon (according to Kathleen M. O'Connor, "Jeremiah Introduction," in The New Interpreter's Study Bible). Jeremiah was called to speak to warring factions within his own country, and as time went on and war destroyed Jerusalem and the temple within it, he would be talking to people who had been personally ravaged by the wages of war, people who were now enslaved, whose children had been taken from them, who were not only homeless but were forced to live in enemy territory, working for their enemies.
Jeremiah's life and work has many similarities to Moses. Like Moses, Jeremiah was called personally by God, driven to confront kings. Each man protested their inability to speak on behalf of God. Both of their careers span forty years -- Moses leading his people through the wilderness, Jeremiah warning the nation and lamenting with them loss and exile. Both promise to the people that God will give them the Promised Land, but the people, out of fear, wind up in temporary exile before the promise of God is realized.
Today's passage ends with an interesting event that parallels Isaiah's call more than a century earlier. When God called Isaiah, who was a priest in the temple, Isaiah cried out that he was a man of unclean lips, living in a nation that was the same. So God sent a seraph (a six-winged angel) to take a burning coal from the altar with tongs and touch his lips with it, so that he would be clean. In Jeremiah's case, "the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth." This also parallels the experience of John the divine in Revelation, to whom God gives a scroll to eat, so that he can produce the words of God. As the writer of Hebrews says: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!" (Hebrews 10:31). If this is the call of God, then it is of paramount importance that we get it right.
The one thing we must not do with Jeremiah's story is to generalize from God's words to him that "before I formed you in the womb I knew you." Jeremiah is being told that he is special, set apart from the rest of us. From before his conception, God was involved in Jeremiah's life, because he had in mind his need for a prophet at the proper time. Rather than applying to every human being in the world, God is telling Jeremiah that he has been "set apart" from before the moment of conception. It goes against the sense of what God is saying to say that we all are known to God before we were formed in the womb.
Hebrews 12:18-29 This passage from Hebrews binds together the New and Old Testament readings. The speaker is using imagery from the encounter between the escapees from Egypt and the mountain of God, also called Mount Sinai. In doing so, there is not only a contrast between that very old image of the fearsomeness of the LORD and the love of God that Jesus preached; there is a new paradigm being established for the people of God.
The people of the Hebrews have traveled from Egypt, across the Sea of Reeds into the Arabian Peninsula, to the foot of a mountain that has been calling them with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. If this sounds like a vision of a volcano, that image becomes reality in the first sentence of this passage. The mountain is burning with fire and surrounded by darkness, gloom, and storm. This is a dramatic description and exactly what a volcanic eruption looks like, including the storm, because volcanoes often create electrical fields which then create lightning bolts in the cloud at the summit.
The area in which the people are walking was a hotbed of volcanic activity in the days of the Bible. Bitumen pits (like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles) were a source of asphalt for mortar and ink, which the ancients used to write the biblical documents on papyrus or vellum. The valley in which Sodom and Gomorrah were located held similar tar pits and mud volcanoes. So it should be no surprise that Mount Sinai sounds like a volcano in eruption.
Of course, this display was terrifying. Add to it the sound of a trumpet blast and the groans of the rocks themselves, and it is no stretch to think of the mountain as being alive, or at the very least harboring the God that called Moses to lead the Hebrews to this event. This is not, however, to say that there was no divine presence with Moses. It is simply to say that often God uses natural phenomena to talk to us or to make a point. It is a point of faith to accept God's work in the natural world as God's word to us.
In this instance, the mountain was truly both a mountain of fear and a mountain of joy. We ought to have fear -- in the sense of reverence -- when we come to face God. But we ought also to be joyful to meet God.
The writer of Hebrews wants us to know that Jesus makes the difference between these two views of meeting God. Just as the woman in Luke 13 was probably frightened to step out into the congregation of men, yet was hopeful of what Jesus might have in mind for her, so we approach God in trepidation (knowing, as Jeremiah knew, that we are not prepared to serve our God). Yet we can be hopeful too. We can hope that God loves us as much as Jesus says God does. And the reason we have the hope is that Jesus told his disciples he is the embodiment of God, and Jesus is compassionate, caring, and sees who we are and what we need. It is in this way that this passage ties together the Old and New Testament readings.
