Judgment
Commentary
Object:
This week's lessons are all about judgment: the judgment of God, our judgments of others, our judgment of ourselves, and our hope that God will judge us gently and receive us with love. Along the path, we are invited to think about the end of our age, even the end of the world as we have known it (which may be the same thing). All along the way, however, we are told by prophet and Christ that the humble path is ever the best one.
Joel 2:23-32
This passage from Joel seems at first to be disjointed, as though the ending verses should be first, followed by a prophecy of hope. But strange as it may seem, this entire passage was seen by the people to whom Joel was writing as a hopeful one. The fact that it ends in a set of "signs and portents" does not diminish the good news that Joel is bringing: these dark signs (which are today all too familiar from the evening news) were for the people of Judah the signs that the Day of the Lord was at hand, and that day should not be dreaded by God's people.
On the other hand, the hope that is offered is not that all of the people in the land would be alive to see this. Rather, Joel says that those who survive will be only those "who call on the name of the LORD," and those whom God has called. There is a winnowing process inferred. To speak of "survivors" means there are others who will perish. There is no easy way of escape. But for those who survive, there is a promise of plenty.
In our place and time, there is a buffering of the ravages of drought and insect destruction of our crops. We have bio-engineered our grains to be drought-resistant, and liberal applications of insecticides can save our crops from total destruction. And little attention is given to the collateral damage to our planet brought on by those insecticides and other chemicals. Even more important, the average consumer is three steps removed from the problems of bringing crops to market. As far as most people are concerned, produce and grains show up in our markets as if by magic. With 70% of our population living in large cities, few have any idea of how food is grown, and little or no understanding that a crop can be completely destroyed. If frost hits Florida orange trees, we can simply buy oranges grown in Texas or California -- or even some other country. We can have strawberries in the deepest part of winter, and apples in spring, and this is accepted as the norm, rather than an exceptional blessing.
On the other hand, we too have prophets. And they have been telling us for over fifty years (think Rachel Carson) that our pollution of this planet is going to end in our destruction. That our overuse of the natural resources, our spendthrift approach to using more and more rather than making do, has the inevitable end of making our planet uninhabitable. There may be a remnant in that survives, but those who depend on their money are in the worst of shape when the coinage and paper that we use to define wealth are of no value compared to having food to eat, water fit to drink, and breathable air.
The destruction and renewal that Joel foresaw involved only his own people in his own country; there was for Joel no concept of worldwide destruction, where the destruction of an atomic power plant in Japan sends rafts of radioactive debris across an entire ocean to wash up on the shores of North America a few years later. In our world, the hope that there will be a remnant of humans still alive in another hundred years could, once again, be good news. It is just unclear who will survive and why. Joel says it will be "those whom the LORD calls," but that's a bit like saying God does what God does, and we cannot understand or predict why this one lives and that one does not. (Although there are always those people who will try to discern the reasons, be they ever so indiscernible.)
The trick in preaching on the prophets is really the same as in Joel's day: people have a way of tuning out what they cannot stand to hear. We need not think that our message of possible destruction will be welcomed even if our audience hears what we say. And the result is preachers who deliver the same message that Joel did will probably be castigated and even fired by their congregations. The question is, will we have the courage of Joel in the face of opposition?
There is reward for those who persevere, according to Joel. Not just that they will survive, but they will thrive. We need to back up to verse 21 to see how thorough God's blessing is. In this verse, the prophet tells the soil itself to be glad and rejoice over the great things God has done. Although a plague of locusts has chopped down the grains and stripped bare the trees, all will be restored.
In verse 22, the animals of the field are also comforted, for their pastures will again be green, and forage will be plentiful.
It is only in verse 23 that the blessings of renewal are pronounced for us humans. Our blessings evolve from the land and the animals, so they must be restored before we can rejoice again. And what rejoicing! A veritable supermarket is spread before a nation who had, always, to provide for themselves by hard work. The other nations will have no reason to laugh at the poverty of Israel.
Most important of all, God will pour out spiritual blessings upon his people. This outpouring of the breath of God is not only for the priests, it will be poured out upon the entire population. The triple blessing of prophecy, dream, and vision will be given not to one age or social group, but to children, the elderly and even the slaves, both male and female! Again, the tricky part of such an outpouring is not the gift of seeing and speaking, but of listening to what these prophecies, dreams, and visions tell us about our relationship with God.
We who preach have a double burden, as Paul pointed out. We may well hear the word of God and preach it, but we must also listen to that which God has given us to say. Our lives preach even when we are not in the pulpit, and when we fail our Lord by doing what we have told others not to do, it makes a mockery of our ministry and even our God. Are we to be true prophets, or of that class of so-called prophets, who claim to have the truth but fail to live by it? Or shall we, like the writer of our New Testament lesson, be recognized as faithful to the end?
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
When we discuss the letters to Timothy, there is a good deal of disagreement about their place in the early writings of the church. While the first letter to Timothy is clearly not written by the Apostle Paul, there is much less agreement among scholars concerning this second letter. Some of this difference is that in 1 Timothy there is a great deal of discussion about church order and policy. But 2 Timothy bears the hallmarks of a last testimony of a faithful servant who is about to die. His concerns are that the recipient (and the whole church) should be unwavering in living out the good news ("keeping the faith"). He is insistent on spreading that word to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews. And the Lord should be continually praised for whatever success the people have in spreading that good news.
All of these messages sound like the apostle and that congruity is the strongest reason to attribute the work to him. There is one uncertainty, and it is contained in the passage for this Sunday -- the statement that the writer went through two hearings, the first one of which left the writer alone in his own defense. The New Interpreter's Study Bible notes say: "These are difficult to place within the chronology of Paul's career, as reflected in his undisputed letters or Acts." Since Acts was written by Luke, this means that we are not dependent simply on what we are certain was written by Paul himself, and that gives us firmer ground on what the Apostle Paul actually went through.
Whatever we might say about who the author is, the words resonate for us. He is coming to the end of his career, and he can say without hesitation that he has "fought the good fight," "finished the race," and "kept the faith." Whether he has been successful in what he has tried to accomplish is secondary, and will be open to the interpretation of those who come after him. But that he has been faithful to God as he has understood his work to be is not open to the interpretation of others. He did not run away, he did not turn his back on his duty. As a result, he is not afraid of the future. He is not afraid to die.
On the contrary, he has seen the hand of the Lord in what he has gone through already. When he came to his first trial, he felt the presence of the Lord with him. He was able to "fully proclaim" the good news so that all the Gentiles (presumably those present at the trial) might hear the message he has been preaching all along. And he was apparently found not guilty of sedition, the charge usually brought against those preaching a "new religion" in the Roman Empire.
This leaves him at peace. He knows that no matter what may come, "there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord... will give me on that day…." His certainty is not brought about by his own actions. It rests on a universal gift from God to "all who have longed for his appearing." In other words, we may be certain of the same simply because we, too, have longed for the coming of Christ.
There are problems with our commonality with the author, however. "The coming of the Lord" has a different meaning for us today. Paul believed in the resurrection of the dead. That is to say, he believed that people die and are buried and then resurrected on some later date, when the Lord would descend from the heavens in glory, calling the dead back to life. People today generally believe in the persistence of the life of the soul, which they believe to be separate from the body, which is buried. Most American Christians believe that the soul goes on without the body, and do not look forward to a general resurrection of the bodies of all the dead on some future date. This different understanding also changes the meaning of the "coming of the Lord" from an imminent event with personal meaning to something unimaginable that is far in the future.
The other phrase that needs some explanation is in verse 17, where the author says, "So I was rescued from the lion's mouth." Since it was a part of the "games" held in the Coliseum in Rome to throw those convicted of crime into the arena with lions, it would be a temptation to take that literally. And it may have been so, but not in Paul's time. Probably this is a use of an Old Testament metaphor, meaning to be saved from great harm. The following comment that "the Lord will rescue me from every evil attack" should not be taken to mean that God will literally save a person from such circumstances, since it is clear from history that many people who have served God well have suffered and died. Rather, it should be taken as the author's faith that whatever others may do to him, he will not be robbed of his heavenly hope.
When we look around our modern world, do we despair? There are so many movies, TV shows, and video games that posit the end of the world as we have known it, it would be easy to say that we expect the world to end, and soon. But in all of these movies, there is the hero and heroine who stand and face whatever evil is presenting and fight with all they have to see to it that evil does not win. This demonstrates the same kind of faith expressed in this letter.
Luke 18:9-14
The first thing Jesus addresses in the gospel reading is the question of those who trust their own righteousness. The very word "righteous" has a tainted meaning in today's world. The original meaning is "to do what is right" -- not to judge what others do, nor to judge even ourselves. Today, when we talk about being "righteous" we generally mean "self-righteous," which carries that element of judgment. This Pharisee is the very model of such self-puffery.
The Pharisee in general, however, was a man who was trying to earn his way with God. He said a prayer before everything he set about to do. He kept the Sabbath laws very strictly. He washed as a matter of keeping clean before God as well as being clean in his physical person. Yes, he said many of his prayers in public, but this was in order to be a witness to others that one should honor God (as Christians do when we pray before a meal in a restaurant). He gave to the poor, both in the street and at temple (or synagogue). After all, there were beggars everywhere one went in that part of the world, there being no welfare system. The blind and the lame had no other way to make a living, and if one were not to burden one's family, then taking a bowl and holding it out when anyone passed was the only way to get by. And if the Pharisee slipped a coin in the bowl secretly, then he was not provoking those around him to do the same.
In prayer, it was the custom to begin by thanking God for what one had. "I thank you, God, that I am a man, a Jew, and not in need" was a common beginning for prayer. This Pharisee, rather than simply thanking God for his status and the comforts of his life, gets carried away. It is appropriate to thank God that one has not been reduced to theft to make a living. It is even appropriate to thank God for helping us to avoid sin, such as adultery. After all, if you've never been tempted, it's no great thing to avoid a particular sin. Thanking God for keeping us from sin announces to our own hearts that we know we have been tempted, and that it is by the grace of God (or our close relationship with God) that we have avoided falling.
This Pharisee is still failing. He is doing what he ought to do -- fasting twice a week (when only one day a week is hard enough) and he gives a tenth of all his income. But he stands in judgment on the nearby tax collector, who is openly a sinner, since he makes his living collecting taxes for the Romans on his fellow Jews. And since he is openly a sinner, the only people who will have anything to do with him are his fellow sinners.
Jesus then takes us over to the tax collector, who is doing the most unlikely of things! He is beating his breast and asking "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" What, a man who makes his living off his fellow Jews, who serves the oppressor Romans, is begging for forgiveness? This man sits down every day at his tax-collection booth and tells people what they owe, knowing that he is overcharging so he can pay himself for his work. He is rich at the expense of others and knows that he is a sinner? Why doesn't he just quit his job and get honest work?
But Jesus sees the man himself. He sees that this man knows that he is a sinner. We have no idea if he thinks his job is sinful. We know only that he is not at the temple to judge the others there. He is there to ask for God's mercy.
And this is the difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector. One knows his status with God. The other does not. One judges himself and others. One is only concerned with how God judges him. One is self-satisfied. The other knows there is room for improvement. One thinks he knows how God sees him. The other also thinks he knows how God sees him. One goes home put right ("justified") with God. The other risks being humbled by God.
Although Jesus does not quote it here, the Pharisee needs to remember Leviticus 19:15: "You shall not render an unjust judgment." Of course, we never think we do. We think that our judgments are accurate. So Jesus went one step further: "Judge not lest you be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." And our prayer today might be to remember that when someone cuts us off when we're driving.
Joel 2:23-32
This passage from Joel seems at first to be disjointed, as though the ending verses should be first, followed by a prophecy of hope. But strange as it may seem, this entire passage was seen by the people to whom Joel was writing as a hopeful one. The fact that it ends in a set of "signs and portents" does not diminish the good news that Joel is bringing: these dark signs (which are today all too familiar from the evening news) were for the people of Judah the signs that the Day of the Lord was at hand, and that day should not be dreaded by God's people.
On the other hand, the hope that is offered is not that all of the people in the land would be alive to see this. Rather, Joel says that those who survive will be only those "who call on the name of the LORD," and those whom God has called. There is a winnowing process inferred. To speak of "survivors" means there are others who will perish. There is no easy way of escape. But for those who survive, there is a promise of plenty.
In our place and time, there is a buffering of the ravages of drought and insect destruction of our crops. We have bio-engineered our grains to be drought-resistant, and liberal applications of insecticides can save our crops from total destruction. And little attention is given to the collateral damage to our planet brought on by those insecticides and other chemicals. Even more important, the average consumer is three steps removed from the problems of bringing crops to market. As far as most people are concerned, produce and grains show up in our markets as if by magic. With 70% of our population living in large cities, few have any idea of how food is grown, and little or no understanding that a crop can be completely destroyed. If frost hits Florida orange trees, we can simply buy oranges grown in Texas or California -- or even some other country. We can have strawberries in the deepest part of winter, and apples in spring, and this is accepted as the norm, rather than an exceptional blessing.
On the other hand, we too have prophets. And they have been telling us for over fifty years (think Rachel Carson) that our pollution of this planet is going to end in our destruction. That our overuse of the natural resources, our spendthrift approach to using more and more rather than making do, has the inevitable end of making our planet uninhabitable. There may be a remnant in that survives, but those who depend on their money are in the worst of shape when the coinage and paper that we use to define wealth are of no value compared to having food to eat, water fit to drink, and breathable air.
The destruction and renewal that Joel foresaw involved only his own people in his own country; there was for Joel no concept of worldwide destruction, where the destruction of an atomic power plant in Japan sends rafts of radioactive debris across an entire ocean to wash up on the shores of North America a few years later. In our world, the hope that there will be a remnant of humans still alive in another hundred years could, once again, be good news. It is just unclear who will survive and why. Joel says it will be "those whom the LORD calls," but that's a bit like saying God does what God does, and we cannot understand or predict why this one lives and that one does not. (Although there are always those people who will try to discern the reasons, be they ever so indiscernible.)
The trick in preaching on the prophets is really the same as in Joel's day: people have a way of tuning out what they cannot stand to hear. We need not think that our message of possible destruction will be welcomed even if our audience hears what we say. And the result is preachers who deliver the same message that Joel did will probably be castigated and even fired by their congregations. The question is, will we have the courage of Joel in the face of opposition?
There is reward for those who persevere, according to Joel. Not just that they will survive, but they will thrive. We need to back up to verse 21 to see how thorough God's blessing is. In this verse, the prophet tells the soil itself to be glad and rejoice over the great things God has done. Although a plague of locusts has chopped down the grains and stripped bare the trees, all will be restored.
In verse 22, the animals of the field are also comforted, for their pastures will again be green, and forage will be plentiful.
It is only in verse 23 that the blessings of renewal are pronounced for us humans. Our blessings evolve from the land and the animals, so they must be restored before we can rejoice again. And what rejoicing! A veritable supermarket is spread before a nation who had, always, to provide for themselves by hard work. The other nations will have no reason to laugh at the poverty of Israel.
Most important of all, God will pour out spiritual blessings upon his people. This outpouring of the breath of God is not only for the priests, it will be poured out upon the entire population. The triple blessing of prophecy, dream, and vision will be given not to one age or social group, but to children, the elderly and even the slaves, both male and female! Again, the tricky part of such an outpouring is not the gift of seeing and speaking, but of listening to what these prophecies, dreams, and visions tell us about our relationship with God.
We who preach have a double burden, as Paul pointed out. We may well hear the word of God and preach it, but we must also listen to that which God has given us to say. Our lives preach even when we are not in the pulpit, and when we fail our Lord by doing what we have told others not to do, it makes a mockery of our ministry and even our God. Are we to be true prophets, or of that class of so-called prophets, who claim to have the truth but fail to live by it? Or shall we, like the writer of our New Testament lesson, be recognized as faithful to the end?
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
When we discuss the letters to Timothy, there is a good deal of disagreement about their place in the early writings of the church. While the first letter to Timothy is clearly not written by the Apostle Paul, there is much less agreement among scholars concerning this second letter. Some of this difference is that in 1 Timothy there is a great deal of discussion about church order and policy. But 2 Timothy bears the hallmarks of a last testimony of a faithful servant who is about to die. His concerns are that the recipient (and the whole church) should be unwavering in living out the good news ("keeping the faith"). He is insistent on spreading that word to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews. And the Lord should be continually praised for whatever success the people have in spreading that good news.
All of these messages sound like the apostle and that congruity is the strongest reason to attribute the work to him. There is one uncertainty, and it is contained in the passage for this Sunday -- the statement that the writer went through two hearings, the first one of which left the writer alone in his own defense. The New Interpreter's Study Bible notes say: "These are difficult to place within the chronology of Paul's career, as reflected in his undisputed letters or Acts." Since Acts was written by Luke, this means that we are not dependent simply on what we are certain was written by Paul himself, and that gives us firmer ground on what the Apostle Paul actually went through.
Whatever we might say about who the author is, the words resonate for us. He is coming to the end of his career, and he can say without hesitation that he has "fought the good fight," "finished the race," and "kept the faith." Whether he has been successful in what he has tried to accomplish is secondary, and will be open to the interpretation of those who come after him. But that he has been faithful to God as he has understood his work to be is not open to the interpretation of others. He did not run away, he did not turn his back on his duty. As a result, he is not afraid of the future. He is not afraid to die.
On the contrary, he has seen the hand of the Lord in what he has gone through already. When he came to his first trial, he felt the presence of the Lord with him. He was able to "fully proclaim" the good news so that all the Gentiles (presumably those present at the trial) might hear the message he has been preaching all along. And he was apparently found not guilty of sedition, the charge usually brought against those preaching a "new religion" in the Roman Empire.
This leaves him at peace. He knows that no matter what may come, "there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord... will give me on that day…." His certainty is not brought about by his own actions. It rests on a universal gift from God to "all who have longed for his appearing." In other words, we may be certain of the same simply because we, too, have longed for the coming of Christ.
There are problems with our commonality with the author, however. "The coming of the Lord" has a different meaning for us today. Paul believed in the resurrection of the dead. That is to say, he believed that people die and are buried and then resurrected on some later date, when the Lord would descend from the heavens in glory, calling the dead back to life. People today generally believe in the persistence of the life of the soul, which they believe to be separate from the body, which is buried. Most American Christians believe that the soul goes on without the body, and do not look forward to a general resurrection of the bodies of all the dead on some future date. This different understanding also changes the meaning of the "coming of the Lord" from an imminent event with personal meaning to something unimaginable that is far in the future.
The other phrase that needs some explanation is in verse 17, where the author says, "So I was rescued from the lion's mouth." Since it was a part of the "games" held in the Coliseum in Rome to throw those convicted of crime into the arena with lions, it would be a temptation to take that literally. And it may have been so, but not in Paul's time. Probably this is a use of an Old Testament metaphor, meaning to be saved from great harm. The following comment that "the Lord will rescue me from every evil attack" should not be taken to mean that God will literally save a person from such circumstances, since it is clear from history that many people who have served God well have suffered and died. Rather, it should be taken as the author's faith that whatever others may do to him, he will not be robbed of his heavenly hope.
When we look around our modern world, do we despair? There are so many movies, TV shows, and video games that posit the end of the world as we have known it, it would be easy to say that we expect the world to end, and soon. But in all of these movies, there is the hero and heroine who stand and face whatever evil is presenting and fight with all they have to see to it that evil does not win. This demonstrates the same kind of faith expressed in this letter.
Luke 18:9-14
The first thing Jesus addresses in the gospel reading is the question of those who trust their own righteousness. The very word "righteous" has a tainted meaning in today's world. The original meaning is "to do what is right" -- not to judge what others do, nor to judge even ourselves. Today, when we talk about being "righteous" we generally mean "self-righteous," which carries that element of judgment. This Pharisee is the very model of such self-puffery.
The Pharisee in general, however, was a man who was trying to earn his way with God. He said a prayer before everything he set about to do. He kept the Sabbath laws very strictly. He washed as a matter of keeping clean before God as well as being clean in his physical person. Yes, he said many of his prayers in public, but this was in order to be a witness to others that one should honor God (as Christians do when we pray before a meal in a restaurant). He gave to the poor, both in the street and at temple (or synagogue). After all, there were beggars everywhere one went in that part of the world, there being no welfare system. The blind and the lame had no other way to make a living, and if one were not to burden one's family, then taking a bowl and holding it out when anyone passed was the only way to get by. And if the Pharisee slipped a coin in the bowl secretly, then he was not provoking those around him to do the same.
In prayer, it was the custom to begin by thanking God for what one had. "I thank you, God, that I am a man, a Jew, and not in need" was a common beginning for prayer. This Pharisee, rather than simply thanking God for his status and the comforts of his life, gets carried away. It is appropriate to thank God that one has not been reduced to theft to make a living. It is even appropriate to thank God for helping us to avoid sin, such as adultery. After all, if you've never been tempted, it's no great thing to avoid a particular sin. Thanking God for keeping us from sin announces to our own hearts that we know we have been tempted, and that it is by the grace of God (or our close relationship with God) that we have avoided falling.
This Pharisee is still failing. He is doing what he ought to do -- fasting twice a week (when only one day a week is hard enough) and he gives a tenth of all his income. But he stands in judgment on the nearby tax collector, who is openly a sinner, since he makes his living collecting taxes for the Romans on his fellow Jews. And since he is openly a sinner, the only people who will have anything to do with him are his fellow sinners.
Jesus then takes us over to the tax collector, who is doing the most unlikely of things! He is beating his breast and asking "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" What, a man who makes his living off his fellow Jews, who serves the oppressor Romans, is begging for forgiveness? This man sits down every day at his tax-collection booth and tells people what they owe, knowing that he is overcharging so he can pay himself for his work. He is rich at the expense of others and knows that he is a sinner? Why doesn't he just quit his job and get honest work?
But Jesus sees the man himself. He sees that this man knows that he is a sinner. We have no idea if he thinks his job is sinful. We know only that he is not at the temple to judge the others there. He is there to ask for God's mercy.
And this is the difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector. One knows his status with God. The other does not. One judges himself and others. One is only concerned with how God judges him. One is self-satisfied. The other knows there is room for improvement. One thinks he knows how God sees him. The other also thinks he knows how God sees him. One goes home put right ("justified") with God. The other risks being humbled by God.
Although Jesus does not quote it here, the Pharisee needs to remember Leviticus 19:15: "You shall not render an unjust judgment." Of course, we never think we do. We think that our judgments are accurate. So Jesus went one step further: "Judge not lest you be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." And our prayer today might be to remember that when someone cuts us off when we're driving.
