Christ crucified
Commentary
Jimmy Carter was the first person elected to be President who admitted he was "born again." Under suspicion by much of the nation to whom such language about "a personal experience of Jesus" was unfamiliar, Mr. Carter knew that some feared he would be overly religious. Like all presidents, he did include a religious note in his inaugural address, but his was most brief. He simply referred to a text a teacher had taught him: Micah 6:1-8.
A good choice. Many politicians like it. We are better off when they choose this one than when they select passages identifying American government with that of ancient Israel. That theocracy, which was to be directly God-ruled, was an elect nation in ways ours cannot be. In our republic, we cannot see everything about Israel applied to us -- unless we want to see the Word of God "bound."
Micah 6:1-8 is addressed to Israel, of course, and we get in on the conversation as kibitzers, eavesdroppers, overhearers, and ... well, yes, heirs of their covenant. When we hear the Lord through Micah tracing the story of Israel's deliverance, it parallels the story of the rescue enjoyed by each member, each congregation.
Oh, yes, the heirs who open a testament, a will, enter a covenant of responsibility, as well. That's where the eighth verse comes in to spell things out. It still addresses us.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
This is one of the most easily misused of the Pauline texts. We all get an excuse to "dumb down" our preaching and the Gospel and to "boast up" our humility. In the nineteenth century at a convention, a Methodist bishop used it to brag about his own failure to have a theological education or to have much learning. He was not among the "wise." After he had gone on a while, a simple pastor asked, "Do I understand that our bishop is proud of his ignorance?" "Indeed, yes!" answered the bishop. "Then," said the pastor, "I move we sing the Te Deum, for the bishop has much, much for which to be proud and grateful."
Paul, never a dumber-down type, must have had something other in mind than what that bishop thought he meant. God honors all kinds of gifts, having been the Giver of them. God, say scriptural texts, expects the best of those to whom any measure of gifts have been given. So the Gospel is democratic, leveling in many respects. But those who fail to live up to their responsibilities, to use brain and brawn, imagination and intelligence -- they are failing in responsibility.
What Paul knew then and we know now is that the world often, not always, measures wisdom, nobility, weakness, and lowness wrong. It does not notice how often not Number One but an unknown turns history around. Each text like this makes but one point, and this one has as its single point God's ability to bring much even out of "things that are not" in order to free us all from having to claim that we did it all.
Matthew 5:1-12
The temptation not to preach on the Beatitudes has to be strong. They have been stitched on so many samplers, engraved on so many walls, used and misused so much by those who rip them out of context -- a disk jockey in our town asks us to live by the "beatitudes" -- that we find it hard to find anything fresh to say.
Yet there is nothing but freshness in them, and they are to be heard if we let the lines of the Sermon speak. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a great Catholic theologian, in his Theological Anthropology wants to picture us young. Von Balthasar had nothing against aging. But the aged person has learned compromise, pacing, muffling, "getting along by going along" (I hope, as I age).
Jesus is a perpetual youth, not in the sense that he is a member of or would cultivate in us a sense that we should belong to a cult of youth. No, his being young when he died, his need to be crucified after what he said and did, his reaching ordinary people and upsetting authority, all this seemed to be part of the adventure that came with his age and posture. Von Balthasar used a phrase out of Nietzsche to describe this: "Jesus did not 'think what the day thought.' " Those who think today's conventional, expectable thought see it fade and disappear with the day.
These Beatitudes are fresh, radical, and thus capable of unsettling and healing anyone in range.
Purity of heart, we have it on Søren Kierkegaard's authority, is to will one thing. Who needs his authority: any of us who have sought purity have learned to purge our minds and lives of distractions and complications. Subtleties come in, but only after the "one thing" is set.
Think of this as "one thing" Sunday, with variations of the sort that appear in manifold forms in the Bible and almost infinite challenges to the billion people called by the name of Christ.
Variation one asks for purity of heart by willing to respond to God's call for pure worship. The surprise in the Isaiah text comes when we recognize that the self-revealing Lord means something different by worship than do most of us. Clip Isaiah, best of all in a modern colloquial translation, and you have an agenda for church and, I suppose, for state, and for personal life.
Clip 1 Corinthians, then, for the focus in the Christian life. Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew are too rigorous, too demanding of the will of us ordinary folk who have not that much willpower or good will; we need help. There is only one kind described: the fulfiller (see Matthew 5) of the Law, the one who brings the light of dawn into our lives (picking up from Isaiah 58) is "Christ, crucified." That line provides the focus for the day, or the prism through which we look at the rest of the themes of the day.
Through the perspective of Christ crucified we are ready for what would otherwise be devastating in the Sermon on the Mount.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Micah 6:1-8
The cool, laid-back God of the omni's -- omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent -- can hardly be imagined in a temper tantrum. But the God who called Abraham and Sarah out of the desert and raised Jesus from the dead has on more than one occasion been known to shed the dispassion and take a person or a people on, no holds barred.
So God appears in Micah's prophecy, striding out into the open sun with clenched fists to shout out a challenge: "All right, if that's the way you want it, you're going to have to deal with me!" Maybe the cosmic isolation has led to some problems with anger -- a little interpersonal work might be in order.
But the God of the exodus will brush that aside with all of the other contrivances of the human heart offered to accommodate us to death. Intent as a new groom, eager as a bride, this God is mystified to the point of outrage by anything but the same. So God recites the history of his love, including not only the exodus and the settlement of the land but reference to one of the great biblical jokes, when this Lord of the passion confounded a king by speaking through a prophet's ass -- the four-legged variety (Numbers 22, 25). If it's not enough that God has temper problems, here is evidence of bad taste -- a real indelicacy.
For all of its offense against suburban, upper middle class stereotypes, this recital of the particularities of God's love is enough to move the prophet to some reconsideration of cultic pieties. In fact, his response looks very much like repentance.
If God were the Lord of the self-possessed, preoccupation with manners and morals would be in order. Then appearance would really be ultimate and the externals of verses six and seven -- the usual sacrifices, a multiplication of the same, even the surrender of something truly precious -- could be rung in with easy confidence. The old self, comfortably in charge, could add religion to a growing list of other achievements indicating well-roundedness and proper adjustment.
But the God who loses his head, who puts heart on the line, is hardly likely to be put off with such chilly offertories. Plunging in headfirst, God takes hold of prophet and people to carry us into the depths of everyday life, where fairness spills over into kindness, where the sense of our own inadequacy is just the reverse side of the coin to a swelling joy. Who could ever begin to keep up with such a one, the Lord of Epiphany whose light is perpetually swinging into the darkness?
