Journey into the world
Commentary
Jules Verne wrote some fascinating books about journeys. They were spectacular journeys like into the center of the earth or to the moon or to no particular destination at all. Those journeys so captivate the human imagination that they became movies, movies renewed for each generation. Other authors, too, have captivated our attention with journeys -- up rivers or through jungles or to impressive mountain peaks.
The journeys of the Bible are literally God-sent, and they are the most spectacular of all. They take us into the world where people live common ordinary lives. The power of our lessons for this Second Sunday in Lent helps us realize that anything short of the whole world as the goal of our journey is a contradiction to the Creator's mission.
Genesis 12:1-4a
The call of Abraham and Sarah comes as a bolt out of the blue. When we read what the Lord promises them here, we would have expected some impressive credentials like their lives of faithfulness or acts of charity or a demonstration of their walking with the Lord. All we receive, however, is Abraham's family tree that was rooted in Shem, one of Noah's boys, and ended with Terah's sons, Abraham, Nahor, and Haran (11:10-27). Haran, the father of Lot, died at a young age, apparently leaving Lot to the care of Terah. Abraham married Sarah who was barren. They all lived at first in Ur of the Chaldees in southern Mesopotamia, but for some reason Terah decided to take his grandson Lot and the childless couple Abraham and Sarah to Canaan. They journeyed north as far as Haran in northern Mesopotamia, and there they stayed.
That's the extent of the background we have. Nothing in that brief history qualifies them for what they receive in our pericope. And that is precisely the point. You might hear a flute playing "Amazing Grace" in the background.
Now the Lord's command to the couple to pull up stakes and go "to the land that I will show you" demanded a faithful response. It involved a journey into the unknown. But a response it was -- an act of faith based on the promise of God.
To this couple who had no credentials God promised (1) to make them a great nation, (2) to bless them, and (3) to make their name great. The promises mean that no matter how famous Abraham and Sarah became, they would owe it all to the faithfulness of the Lord. They would not be able to make any claims for themselves. Everything they became would be the work of God bringing those three promises to fruition.
Most scholars attribute these verses to the work of a theologian/historian called the Yahwist because of the name he used for God. Whatever his actual name, he apparently wrote his material sometime during the reigns of David and Solomon, the golden age of biblical Israel. His purpose in writing was, in the first place, to explain to his contemporaries in the tenth century B.C. how they came to be such a glorious kingdom, rising from scattered and feeble tribes only a generation or two earlier to become this new kid on the international block. The answer lay in the promises the Lord gave to Abraham and Sarah: the Lord was solely responsible for all this glory, acting to fulfill what was promised long ago -- great nation, blessed, famous.
Yet that message was only half his sermon. The second half included the purpose of all this divine grace: "so that you will be a blessing." "To whom?" the Yahwist's contemporaries must have asked. The answer came quickly: "And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." The Hebrew can just as easily be translated "families of the land." The point is that the people of Israel in the time of David and Solomon could consider themselves blessed by the promises of the Lord. But what about the other people who lived between Dan and Beersheba and between the Mediterranean Sea and the Great Rift Valley? Where would the Girgashites, Jebusites, Perizzites, and all the other -ites get their blessing? The Yahwist's answer to the people of Israel was "in you."
As time went on, the expression of verse 3 took on larger proportions as it moved from "families of the land" to "nations of the earth" (18:18; 22:18; 26:4). Perhaps the expression underwent some editing when the people of Israel were scattered among the nations after the fall of the northern kingdom by Assyria in 721 B.C. and in the midst of Judah's exile to Babylon in 597 and 587 B.C. There the prophet would announce their role as "a light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). It was the reach into the Gentile world that led the apostle Paul to cite this formula as "the gospel beforehand to Abraham" (Galatians 3:8).
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
At 3:21-26 Paul laid out the heart of his epistle, indicating that while all have sinned and keep falling short of the glory of God, they all are justified by his grace as a gift. Between that core passage and our own pericope, the apostle excludes boasting because boasting would be allowable only if we achieved this justification by our own works through the law. If, however, it is by God's grace that we are justified and that we appropriate that gift in faith, then we have not reason to boast.
Now we come to the important example of Abraham where Paul illustrates his point. In the verses assigned as our pericope Paul emphasizes the faith of Abraham by alluding to several instances in the Book of Genesis where God makes promises to "our ancestor according to the flesh."
At verse 3 Paul cites Genesis 15:6: "Abraham believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." The words appear in their original context to be the conclusion of the narrator after the previous dialogue between the Lord and Abraham. That dialogue focused on the ongoing problem for Abraham and Sarah, namely, that although God promised they would become a great nation (our first lesson), time was moving by for the couple. It appeared that in their continuing state of childlessness, their slave Eliezer would inherit the estate. The Lord would hear nothing of it. A child from Abraham's aging loins would be the heir, and that would only be the beginning. God could only provide a visual aid to make the point. He took Abraham out into the night and had him count the stars that danced in the pollution-free sky. That is how many descendants Abraham would have. Then comes the comment about Abraham's belief and God's reckoning of that belief as righteousness.
The story makes an excellent illustration of Paul's point. First, that God reckoned or imputed to him righteousness indicates that Abraham is made righteous on the spot. The term "righteous" in the Old Testament is not a moral term or a legal one. It has to do with the faithfulness to a relationship. Here God declares Abraham to be righteous, and so he is. God's word accomplishes what it says (see Isaiah 55:10-11). Abraham's fidelity to the relationship with God is not a matter of his own doing, that is, his own work. It is declared and given by God. The passage bases that righteousness on the announcement that Abraham believed the promise of God regarding the pitter-patter of many feet in the world. As that promise would come to realization, no child of Abraham and Sarah could ever attribute the development of the people of Israel to the couple, not even to a deed of the couple. The fulfillment of the promise would come only as God demonstrated faithfulness to what was said on that starry night. Abraham's faith was not a good deed. It was a matter of his being grasped by God's word of promise and allowing that God to take over his life. That was the faith that led Paul to cite the old stargazer as living proof of "faith apart from works prescribed by the law."
In verse 13 Paul alludes to Genesis 22:17-18 as the promise that Abraham and his descendants would inherit the world. That specific promise is not part of the original call at Genesis 12:2, but following Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, the Lord promises that Abraham's descendants would possess the gate of their enemies and that by his descendants all nations of the earth will be blessed "because you have obeyed my voice." This obedience was not a simple act of doing what he was told. It was one more example of Abraham's trusting the promise of the Lord. Abraham followed the Lord's strange and seemingly contradictory command with the trust that God would nevertheless find a way to fulfill the promise of progeny. Still captivated by the word of the Lord -- as he was from the beginning -- Abraham could "stay the course," trusting against all odds.
Finally, Paul cites Genesis 17:5 at verse 17. The reference to God's having made Abraham the father of many nations occurs following the birth of Ishmael to the servant girl Hagar. Ishmael represents an additional line of Abraham, the Arab peoples, besides the Jewish people who will trace their lineage through Isaac. Paul uses this expression to indicate that Abraham "is the father of us all." Probably in an attempt to demonstrate the unity of the entire congregation in Rome, Jewish Christians and non-Jews alike.
Through one such allusion or quotation after another, Paul argues that faith, demonstrated throughout the Abraham story, is trust in the Lord who has spoken the word of promise and claimed the hearer in a relationship of trust. On that basis, faith is necessary "in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants...."
John 3:1-17
The pericope begins with the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus, but somewhere along the way Nicodemus seems to have dropped out of the spotlight, even while Jesus continues talking. Throughout the seventeen verses, however, some significant themes for Johannine theology are raised.
The first occurs in the verses that introduce Nicodemus. A Pharisee, even more than that, a ruler, one of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and stated that he and others "know" Jesus as Rabbi, "a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." In a sense, his words sound like those of the widow of Zarepheth who, observing and benefiting from the miracles Elijah had been performing in her house, exclaimed, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true" (1 Kings 17:24). The inability of Nicodemus to see beyond that level of identification leads to Jesus' discussion about the need to be "born from above." The implication here is that he, Jesus, is born from above, and that teaching is developed further in verse 13 where Jesus speaks of himself as "the one who descended from heaven." The reader of the Gospel will connect that description to the Prologue where Jesus is identified as the word that was with God and indeed was God and then became flesh to pitch his tent among us. Jesus' identity, not as a teacher come from God but as one born from above, provides the basis for the entire dialogue. That is the first theme of importance for John's theology.
Second, the possibility to be born from above is held out to others. Nicodemus is startled by this teaching because he could not grasp the dual meaning of being born from above and being born again. Imagining his adult body making its way back into his mother's womb raised the rational question: How? His question gives Jesus the opportunity to explain the mystery of the Spirit and to chide the Pharisee over his inability to grasp this possibility. Even in the Bible of Nicodemus, what we call the Old Testament, several instances of God's Spirit or breath or wind brought people to life. Adam, at first nothing more than a construction of dirt, came to life when God breathed into his nostrils the divine breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The valley into which Ezekiel was thrust was full of dry bones, and what brought them to life was the wind of breath that came into them (Ezekiel 37:1-10). Nicodemus must have slapped his hand into his forehead and cried, "I should have known!" The reference to "born from above" along with water and the Spirit (v. 5) surely looks at the sacrament of baptism as the means by which this miracle is achieved. The second theme in John's theology is, therefore, the gift of life that God gives through Jesus Christ, even after people have been born physically into the human race.
That gift of eternal life comes through faith because the Son of Man was lifted up just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. The allusion to Moses' act (see Numbers 21:4-9) recalls the time in the wilderness when the people of Israel complained about the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. Their murmuring led them straight into a nest of serpents whose venom was capable of killing off quite a number of people. At the pleading of those Israelites, Moses prayed to the Lord, and the Lord instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent, elevate it on a pole, and whenever the stricken folks beheld it, they "lived." Jesus' own death on a cross, being lifted up, became the means by which people of faith would live, even eternally.
Third, God's love for the world is the divine motive for the sacrifice of his Son. As verses 16 and 17 conclude the passage, they form a synonymous parallelism. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life" is no different from "God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Salvation and life are one and the same in John's Gospel. Even talk of the kingdom of God ceases with the opening words to Nicodemus. Thereafter, John speaks of life rather than the kingdom, and it has to do with salvation for the world. It was for this reason that God sent Jesus into the world and that Jesus sent his disciples (17:18). It is small wonder that the people in Samaria, having seen and heard Jesus for themselves, announce that "this is truly the Savior of the world" (4:42). Not Israel, not the church, but the world is the arena into which Jesus is sent and to which Jesus sends the world. Not Israel, not the church, but the world is the object of such love that God gives his Son. That is a key theme in John's Gospel, and because of it we can never be satisfied with simply maintaining the institution of the church.
The universal concern of John's Gospel sounds like the object of God's concern in the call of Abraham and Sarah. It is not simply the blessing of Israel that God has in mind but the blessing of all the families of the land and then even of all the nations of the earth. "See," Paul quotes the words of God to Abraham, "I have made you the father of many nations" (Romans 4:17).
Now there's a journey worth taking for God's sake.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 12:1-4a
In order to understand this scripture lesson, it is of utmost importance that we put it in its context. Last Sunday we heard the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where they tried to shake off their dependence and relationship with God and to become their own deities and masters of their own lives. That attempt was symbolized by their eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the midst of the garden. And you remember that we said that story was the symbol of the way we all have walked with our God. We all have tried to make God unnecessary and to be our own gods and goddesses.
The stories that follow the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3-11 then portray the spread of our sin among all humankind and God's increasingly severe judgment on that wrong. In the story of Cain and Abel, brother is set against brother, and Cain slays Abel. The result is that Cain becomes a fugitive and a wanderer on the face of the earth, cut off from all community (Genesis 4:1-14), and Cain is intended as the symbol of the hatred and dissension within our families. The sin spreads farther until we get the account of Lamech's terrible sword of vengeance, in Genesis 4:23-24, and he is the symbol of our violence and warfare that we wreak throughout the earth. That results in the story of the flood in the time of Noah, when God sees that "every imagination of the thoughts of (our) hearts is only evil continually" and so is sorry that he has made us on this earth (Genesis 6:5-6). God therefore destroys his creation with the waters of the flood, and yet human beings do not improve. The final story in Genesis 11, therefore, is the story of the Tower of Babel, when we human beings set out to storm the heights of heaven and to make a name for ourselves, in order to guarantee that we will have fame and security. But that attempt to prosper and save our own lives is thwarted by God's judgment on our sinful self-seeking. He confuses our language and scatters us abroad on the face of the earth (Genesis 11:7-9).
What is the state of human society because of our rebellion against God, therefore, according to this primeval history in the first eleven chapters of Genesis -- that account that is the story of us all? We could read of it in our morning newspapers. We have corrupted all of God's good gifts -- his gift of family and love, his good gifts of beauty and work, his gift of community among neighbors and nations, and yes, his gift of fellowship with himself. We are cut off from our God and from each other and from the natural world by our sin. We have passed the point of no return and have lost our paradise (cf. Genesis 3:22-24). And so we have brought upon ourselves the judgment of death, for "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).
To be sure, at every point in the story in Genesis 3-11, God's grace follows his judgment. Adam and Eve do not immediately die. They are clothed by God himself -- God the tailor -- and God helps Eve have a child (Genesis 3:21; 4:1). Despite the fact that Cain is driven away from the face of God and from every human community (Genesis 4:14), the Lord nevertheless puts a mark on him, so no one will kill him (4:15). In the flood, Noah and his family and representatives of every living creature are saved on the ark (6:18-19), and God himself makes sure that the door of the ark is tightly sealed (7:16). And following the flood, an even fuller life is given to humankind with the rainbow promise that never again will the Lord destroy his creation by the chaotic waters (8:20--9:17).
Yet, we have to ask: Where is the grace at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel? Is Babel God's last word? Are we all doomed forever to have no love or peace or sense of community among neighbors and nations, between brothers and sisters, between husbands and wives? Are we all left with the beauty of the earth turned to thorns and thistles by our ravaging, and God's good gift of work turned into drudgery and futility (3:17-19)? Are we all cut off from our God forever and therefore fated to die, apart from him who is the one source of all life and good?
The answers to those questions are furnished by our text. God calls one man named Abraham out of his home in Mesopotamia, in about 1750 B.C., and he tells Abraham to leave behind his country, his kinfolk, and his closest relatives, and to journey to an unknown land that God will show to Abraham (12:1). At the same time, God gives Abraham a threefold promise. He will give a land to Abraham and his descendants that they may call their own (cf. 12:7). He will make of Abraham's descendants a great nation and make their name renowned (12:2). And through Abraham and his descendants, God will bring blessing on all the families of the earth (12:3).
Those promises pick up motifs from chapter 11. At the Tower of Babel, humankind has tried to make a name for itself (11:4), but it is God who will make Israel's name great (12:2). In 11:30, we read that Sarah, the wife of Abraham, is barren and has no child. But God promises Abraham that his descendants will be numerous enough to make a large nation (12:2). Thus does the Lord contradict the sinful course of our lives and history.
At the same time, God's promise to father Abraham is a vow to reverse the effects of our cursed rebellion that was portrayed for us in Genesis 3-11. We lost our paradise, said that primeval history, so God sets out to give Abraham and his people a new land "flowing with milk and honey." We made all community impossible, so the Lord will make a new community, a great nation called Israel. And the Old Testament later tells us that God's intention is to draw all peoples into that new fellowship (cf. e.g. Isaiah 2:2-4; 44:5; Zechariah 8:20-23; Ephesians 2:12-22). We brought upon ourselves the curse of devastation and drudgery and death. God promises to turn it all into blessing through his instrument of Abraham and his people.
In short, God calls Abraham because he loves us all, and is determined to overcome the effects of our sin in our lives and in our world. God sets out in the father of our faith to restore us all to the good life that he intended for us all in the beginning. There is therefore added to this threefold promise in Genesis 12 also the promise of a covenant with Israel, in which humankind's relation with God will be restored (Genesis 17:4-7). And when Jesus Christ sat at table at the Lord's Supper and offered us the new covenant in his blood, that promise was fulfilled (Mark 14:24).
That is what God is doing here and now in our world, good Christians. He is working to keep his word, to reverse the effects of our sin, to bring blessing on us all, to make of us a new people, living in a new community of peace and beauty, meaningful work and goodness, fullness of life (which is what "blessing" means) and love. And the story of how God works to keep his promises is the story that runs through the entire Bible.
If we believe that sacred history and make it ours, by trusting our God, we will be blessed, as our text for the morning says. For God tells Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you, I will curse" (Genesis 12:3). Our life or death, it seems, depends on our attitude toward God's promise and working, begun with Abraham. And if, in faith, we will accept God's words and his actions within our lives, we shall indeed know fullness of life.
The journeys of the Bible are literally God-sent, and they are the most spectacular of all. They take us into the world where people live common ordinary lives. The power of our lessons for this Second Sunday in Lent helps us realize that anything short of the whole world as the goal of our journey is a contradiction to the Creator's mission.
Genesis 12:1-4a
The call of Abraham and Sarah comes as a bolt out of the blue. When we read what the Lord promises them here, we would have expected some impressive credentials like their lives of faithfulness or acts of charity or a demonstration of their walking with the Lord. All we receive, however, is Abraham's family tree that was rooted in Shem, one of Noah's boys, and ended with Terah's sons, Abraham, Nahor, and Haran (11:10-27). Haran, the father of Lot, died at a young age, apparently leaving Lot to the care of Terah. Abraham married Sarah who was barren. They all lived at first in Ur of the Chaldees in southern Mesopotamia, but for some reason Terah decided to take his grandson Lot and the childless couple Abraham and Sarah to Canaan. They journeyed north as far as Haran in northern Mesopotamia, and there they stayed.
That's the extent of the background we have. Nothing in that brief history qualifies them for what they receive in our pericope. And that is precisely the point. You might hear a flute playing "Amazing Grace" in the background.
Now the Lord's command to the couple to pull up stakes and go "to the land that I will show you" demanded a faithful response. It involved a journey into the unknown. But a response it was -- an act of faith based on the promise of God.
To this couple who had no credentials God promised (1) to make them a great nation, (2) to bless them, and (3) to make their name great. The promises mean that no matter how famous Abraham and Sarah became, they would owe it all to the faithfulness of the Lord. They would not be able to make any claims for themselves. Everything they became would be the work of God bringing those three promises to fruition.
Most scholars attribute these verses to the work of a theologian/historian called the Yahwist because of the name he used for God. Whatever his actual name, he apparently wrote his material sometime during the reigns of David and Solomon, the golden age of biblical Israel. His purpose in writing was, in the first place, to explain to his contemporaries in the tenth century B.C. how they came to be such a glorious kingdom, rising from scattered and feeble tribes only a generation or two earlier to become this new kid on the international block. The answer lay in the promises the Lord gave to Abraham and Sarah: the Lord was solely responsible for all this glory, acting to fulfill what was promised long ago -- great nation, blessed, famous.
Yet that message was only half his sermon. The second half included the purpose of all this divine grace: "so that you will be a blessing." "To whom?" the Yahwist's contemporaries must have asked. The answer came quickly: "And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." The Hebrew can just as easily be translated "families of the land." The point is that the people of Israel in the time of David and Solomon could consider themselves blessed by the promises of the Lord. But what about the other people who lived between Dan and Beersheba and between the Mediterranean Sea and the Great Rift Valley? Where would the Girgashites, Jebusites, Perizzites, and all the other -ites get their blessing? The Yahwist's answer to the people of Israel was "in you."
As time went on, the expression of verse 3 took on larger proportions as it moved from "families of the land" to "nations of the earth" (18:18; 22:18; 26:4). Perhaps the expression underwent some editing when the people of Israel were scattered among the nations after the fall of the northern kingdom by Assyria in 721 B.C. and in the midst of Judah's exile to Babylon in 597 and 587 B.C. There the prophet would announce their role as "a light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). It was the reach into the Gentile world that led the apostle Paul to cite this formula as "the gospel beforehand to Abraham" (Galatians 3:8).
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
At 3:21-26 Paul laid out the heart of his epistle, indicating that while all have sinned and keep falling short of the glory of God, they all are justified by his grace as a gift. Between that core passage and our own pericope, the apostle excludes boasting because boasting would be allowable only if we achieved this justification by our own works through the law. If, however, it is by God's grace that we are justified and that we appropriate that gift in faith, then we have not reason to boast.
Now we come to the important example of Abraham where Paul illustrates his point. In the verses assigned as our pericope Paul emphasizes the faith of Abraham by alluding to several instances in the Book of Genesis where God makes promises to "our ancestor according to the flesh."
At verse 3 Paul cites Genesis 15:6: "Abraham believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." The words appear in their original context to be the conclusion of the narrator after the previous dialogue between the Lord and Abraham. That dialogue focused on the ongoing problem for Abraham and Sarah, namely, that although God promised they would become a great nation (our first lesson), time was moving by for the couple. It appeared that in their continuing state of childlessness, their slave Eliezer would inherit the estate. The Lord would hear nothing of it. A child from Abraham's aging loins would be the heir, and that would only be the beginning. God could only provide a visual aid to make the point. He took Abraham out into the night and had him count the stars that danced in the pollution-free sky. That is how many descendants Abraham would have. Then comes the comment about Abraham's belief and God's reckoning of that belief as righteousness.
The story makes an excellent illustration of Paul's point. First, that God reckoned or imputed to him righteousness indicates that Abraham is made righteous on the spot. The term "righteous" in the Old Testament is not a moral term or a legal one. It has to do with the faithfulness to a relationship. Here God declares Abraham to be righteous, and so he is. God's word accomplishes what it says (see Isaiah 55:10-11). Abraham's fidelity to the relationship with God is not a matter of his own doing, that is, his own work. It is declared and given by God. The passage bases that righteousness on the announcement that Abraham believed the promise of God regarding the pitter-patter of many feet in the world. As that promise would come to realization, no child of Abraham and Sarah could ever attribute the development of the people of Israel to the couple, not even to a deed of the couple. The fulfillment of the promise would come only as God demonstrated faithfulness to what was said on that starry night. Abraham's faith was not a good deed. It was a matter of his being grasped by God's word of promise and allowing that God to take over his life. That was the faith that led Paul to cite the old stargazer as living proof of "faith apart from works prescribed by the law."
In verse 13 Paul alludes to Genesis 22:17-18 as the promise that Abraham and his descendants would inherit the world. That specific promise is not part of the original call at Genesis 12:2, but following Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, the Lord promises that Abraham's descendants would possess the gate of their enemies and that by his descendants all nations of the earth will be blessed "because you have obeyed my voice." This obedience was not a simple act of doing what he was told. It was one more example of Abraham's trusting the promise of the Lord. Abraham followed the Lord's strange and seemingly contradictory command with the trust that God would nevertheless find a way to fulfill the promise of progeny. Still captivated by the word of the Lord -- as he was from the beginning -- Abraham could "stay the course," trusting against all odds.
Finally, Paul cites Genesis 17:5 at verse 17. The reference to God's having made Abraham the father of many nations occurs following the birth of Ishmael to the servant girl Hagar. Ishmael represents an additional line of Abraham, the Arab peoples, besides the Jewish people who will trace their lineage through Isaac. Paul uses this expression to indicate that Abraham "is the father of us all." Probably in an attempt to demonstrate the unity of the entire congregation in Rome, Jewish Christians and non-Jews alike.
Through one such allusion or quotation after another, Paul argues that faith, demonstrated throughout the Abraham story, is trust in the Lord who has spoken the word of promise and claimed the hearer in a relationship of trust. On that basis, faith is necessary "in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants...."
John 3:1-17
The pericope begins with the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus, but somewhere along the way Nicodemus seems to have dropped out of the spotlight, even while Jesus continues talking. Throughout the seventeen verses, however, some significant themes for Johannine theology are raised.
The first occurs in the verses that introduce Nicodemus. A Pharisee, even more than that, a ruler, one of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and stated that he and others "know" Jesus as Rabbi, "a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." In a sense, his words sound like those of the widow of Zarepheth who, observing and benefiting from the miracles Elijah had been performing in her house, exclaimed, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true" (1 Kings 17:24). The inability of Nicodemus to see beyond that level of identification leads to Jesus' discussion about the need to be "born from above." The implication here is that he, Jesus, is born from above, and that teaching is developed further in verse 13 where Jesus speaks of himself as "the one who descended from heaven." The reader of the Gospel will connect that description to the Prologue where Jesus is identified as the word that was with God and indeed was God and then became flesh to pitch his tent among us. Jesus' identity, not as a teacher come from God but as one born from above, provides the basis for the entire dialogue. That is the first theme of importance for John's theology.
Second, the possibility to be born from above is held out to others. Nicodemus is startled by this teaching because he could not grasp the dual meaning of being born from above and being born again. Imagining his adult body making its way back into his mother's womb raised the rational question: How? His question gives Jesus the opportunity to explain the mystery of the Spirit and to chide the Pharisee over his inability to grasp this possibility. Even in the Bible of Nicodemus, what we call the Old Testament, several instances of God's Spirit or breath or wind brought people to life. Adam, at first nothing more than a construction of dirt, came to life when God breathed into his nostrils the divine breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The valley into which Ezekiel was thrust was full of dry bones, and what brought them to life was the wind of breath that came into them (Ezekiel 37:1-10). Nicodemus must have slapped his hand into his forehead and cried, "I should have known!" The reference to "born from above" along with water and the Spirit (v. 5) surely looks at the sacrament of baptism as the means by which this miracle is achieved. The second theme in John's theology is, therefore, the gift of life that God gives through Jesus Christ, even after people have been born physically into the human race.
That gift of eternal life comes through faith because the Son of Man was lifted up just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. The allusion to Moses' act (see Numbers 21:4-9) recalls the time in the wilderness when the people of Israel complained about the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. Their murmuring led them straight into a nest of serpents whose venom was capable of killing off quite a number of people. At the pleading of those Israelites, Moses prayed to the Lord, and the Lord instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent, elevate it on a pole, and whenever the stricken folks beheld it, they "lived." Jesus' own death on a cross, being lifted up, became the means by which people of faith would live, even eternally.
Third, God's love for the world is the divine motive for the sacrifice of his Son. As verses 16 and 17 conclude the passage, they form a synonymous parallelism. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life" is no different from "God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Salvation and life are one and the same in John's Gospel. Even talk of the kingdom of God ceases with the opening words to Nicodemus. Thereafter, John speaks of life rather than the kingdom, and it has to do with salvation for the world. It was for this reason that God sent Jesus into the world and that Jesus sent his disciples (17:18). It is small wonder that the people in Samaria, having seen and heard Jesus for themselves, announce that "this is truly the Savior of the world" (4:42). Not Israel, not the church, but the world is the arena into which Jesus is sent and to which Jesus sends the world. Not Israel, not the church, but the world is the object of such love that God gives his Son. That is a key theme in John's Gospel, and because of it we can never be satisfied with simply maintaining the institution of the church.
The universal concern of John's Gospel sounds like the object of God's concern in the call of Abraham and Sarah. It is not simply the blessing of Israel that God has in mind but the blessing of all the families of the land and then even of all the nations of the earth. "See," Paul quotes the words of God to Abraham, "I have made you the father of many nations" (Romans 4:17).
Now there's a journey worth taking for God's sake.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 12:1-4a
In order to understand this scripture lesson, it is of utmost importance that we put it in its context. Last Sunday we heard the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where they tried to shake off their dependence and relationship with God and to become their own deities and masters of their own lives. That attempt was symbolized by their eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the midst of the garden. And you remember that we said that story was the symbol of the way we all have walked with our God. We all have tried to make God unnecessary and to be our own gods and goddesses.
The stories that follow the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3-11 then portray the spread of our sin among all humankind and God's increasingly severe judgment on that wrong. In the story of Cain and Abel, brother is set against brother, and Cain slays Abel. The result is that Cain becomes a fugitive and a wanderer on the face of the earth, cut off from all community (Genesis 4:1-14), and Cain is intended as the symbol of the hatred and dissension within our families. The sin spreads farther until we get the account of Lamech's terrible sword of vengeance, in Genesis 4:23-24, and he is the symbol of our violence and warfare that we wreak throughout the earth. That results in the story of the flood in the time of Noah, when God sees that "every imagination of the thoughts of (our) hearts is only evil continually" and so is sorry that he has made us on this earth (Genesis 6:5-6). God therefore destroys his creation with the waters of the flood, and yet human beings do not improve. The final story in Genesis 11, therefore, is the story of the Tower of Babel, when we human beings set out to storm the heights of heaven and to make a name for ourselves, in order to guarantee that we will have fame and security. But that attempt to prosper and save our own lives is thwarted by God's judgment on our sinful self-seeking. He confuses our language and scatters us abroad on the face of the earth (Genesis 11:7-9).
What is the state of human society because of our rebellion against God, therefore, according to this primeval history in the first eleven chapters of Genesis -- that account that is the story of us all? We could read of it in our morning newspapers. We have corrupted all of God's good gifts -- his gift of family and love, his good gifts of beauty and work, his gift of community among neighbors and nations, and yes, his gift of fellowship with himself. We are cut off from our God and from each other and from the natural world by our sin. We have passed the point of no return and have lost our paradise (cf. Genesis 3:22-24). And so we have brought upon ourselves the judgment of death, for "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).
To be sure, at every point in the story in Genesis 3-11, God's grace follows his judgment. Adam and Eve do not immediately die. They are clothed by God himself -- God the tailor -- and God helps Eve have a child (Genesis 3:21; 4:1). Despite the fact that Cain is driven away from the face of God and from every human community (Genesis 4:14), the Lord nevertheless puts a mark on him, so no one will kill him (4:15). In the flood, Noah and his family and representatives of every living creature are saved on the ark (6:18-19), and God himself makes sure that the door of the ark is tightly sealed (7:16). And following the flood, an even fuller life is given to humankind with the rainbow promise that never again will the Lord destroy his creation by the chaotic waters (8:20--9:17).
Yet, we have to ask: Where is the grace at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel? Is Babel God's last word? Are we all doomed forever to have no love or peace or sense of community among neighbors and nations, between brothers and sisters, between husbands and wives? Are we all left with the beauty of the earth turned to thorns and thistles by our ravaging, and God's good gift of work turned into drudgery and futility (3:17-19)? Are we all cut off from our God forever and therefore fated to die, apart from him who is the one source of all life and good?
The answers to those questions are furnished by our text. God calls one man named Abraham out of his home in Mesopotamia, in about 1750 B.C., and he tells Abraham to leave behind his country, his kinfolk, and his closest relatives, and to journey to an unknown land that God will show to Abraham (12:1). At the same time, God gives Abraham a threefold promise. He will give a land to Abraham and his descendants that they may call their own (cf. 12:7). He will make of Abraham's descendants a great nation and make their name renowned (12:2). And through Abraham and his descendants, God will bring blessing on all the families of the earth (12:3).
Those promises pick up motifs from chapter 11. At the Tower of Babel, humankind has tried to make a name for itself (11:4), but it is God who will make Israel's name great (12:2). In 11:30, we read that Sarah, the wife of Abraham, is barren and has no child. But God promises Abraham that his descendants will be numerous enough to make a large nation (12:2). Thus does the Lord contradict the sinful course of our lives and history.
At the same time, God's promise to father Abraham is a vow to reverse the effects of our cursed rebellion that was portrayed for us in Genesis 3-11. We lost our paradise, said that primeval history, so God sets out to give Abraham and his people a new land "flowing with milk and honey." We made all community impossible, so the Lord will make a new community, a great nation called Israel. And the Old Testament later tells us that God's intention is to draw all peoples into that new fellowship (cf. e.g. Isaiah 2:2-4; 44:5; Zechariah 8:20-23; Ephesians 2:12-22). We brought upon ourselves the curse of devastation and drudgery and death. God promises to turn it all into blessing through his instrument of Abraham and his people.
In short, God calls Abraham because he loves us all, and is determined to overcome the effects of our sin in our lives and in our world. God sets out in the father of our faith to restore us all to the good life that he intended for us all in the beginning. There is therefore added to this threefold promise in Genesis 12 also the promise of a covenant with Israel, in which humankind's relation with God will be restored (Genesis 17:4-7). And when Jesus Christ sat at table at the Lord's Supper and offered us the new covenant in his blood, that promise was fulfilled (Mark 14:24).
That is what God is doing here and now in our world, good Christians. He is working to keep his word, to reverse the effects of our sin, to bring blessing on us all, to make of us a new people, living in a new community of peace and beauty, meaningful work and goodness, fullness of life (which is what "blessing" means) and love. And the story of how God works to keep his promises is the story that runs through the entire Bible.
If we believe that sacred history and make it ours, by trusting our God, we will be blessed, as our text for the morning says. For God tells Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you, I will curse" (Genesis 12:3). Our life or death, it seems, depends on our attitude toward God's promise and working, begun with Abraham. And if, in faith, we will accept God's words and his actions within our lives, we shall indeed know fullness of life.
