Tag Archives: Old Testament Lectionary

Old Testament Lectionary

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 5 – Isaiah 55:10-13 (related)

It is almost universally accepted that the book which we call ‘Isaiah’ comes from three different authors and three different periods. The middle section, which today’s lection draws to a close, runs from chapters 40 – 55, and comes from the time close to the end of the exile, when after a period of letting his people stew and reflect on their unfaithfulness, God is finally going to comfort them, assure them that their sin has been paid for, and bring them home to Jerusalem. Having heard this message, the exiles, I would imagine, must have had mixed feelings. Relief, of course, particularly because of those six words with which this section (‘Deutero- or Second Isaiah’) begins: ‘Comfort my people says your God’. That phrase reflects the covenant deal which comes time and again throughout the OT – ‘You shall be my people and I will be your God’. The pronouns which the prophet uses here are vital. They emphasise, to a nation who no doubt felt that they had really blown it with God this time, and broken the covenant once and for all, that in fact the deal is still on. My people, your God. Phew – what a relief! Is there nothing we can do to offend God so much that he simply abandons us? Not according to this prophet.

But I wonder whether there was another side to the people’s reaction: we’ll believe that when we see it! Hope deferred, says Proverbs 13, makes the heart grow sick. When we suffer so much, and for so long, we really can abandon hope, and every promise of God’s goodness and redemption simply serves to rub our noses in our pain and distress. Cynicism is the sickness of heart which can so easily result. Singing those dreadful worship-songs in church, all about how good and wonderful God is, can be profoundly painful when that simply isn’t your experience. So perhaps just as the prophet began his work with words of comfort, he ends with words of assurance for the downtrodden and cynical. How can we believe these words? Answer: because they are God’s words, and they have power behind them.

The prophet uses a poem which attacks our senses to make the point as strongly and as emotionally as he can. We can feel the cool rain and the freezing snow, even in Babylon in the middle of a desert. We can smell the fragrance of seeds sprouting from damp earth, and of the baking bread, and we can almost taste it in our mouths. And when you are set free from your slavery, says the prophet, all creation is going to line the route home to cheer you on your way. Picture piles on top of picture as abundance surrounds the broken and dispirited people on their way back to their homeland. How can this ‘word’ be trusted? Simply because God said it. It is going to happen, and indeed so it did.

But before we all get carried away, spare a thought for today’s Gospel, the parable of the sower. Again there is a picture of abundance, with up to 100-fold return, but that isn’t the whole story. For Isaiah God’s word is effective full stop. But for Jesus’ sower it all depends on the soil. And there is one of the big paradoxes of the Christian faith. We have an almighty, all-powerful God who rules the universe and can do anything he likes, who simply speaks new things into existence. And yet he chooses to allow himself to be limited by us humans. He doesn’t always get his way: he wouldn’t have told us to pray ‘Your kingdom come’ if it was simply automatic. For those who suffer, who find themselves in all kinds of exiles, we have to live with the purposes of God, which he promises will surely come to pass, not happening because of human sin and rebellion. This paradox might drive us to despair, but it certainly ought to drive us to fervent prayer.

Old Testament Lectionary

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 3 – Jeremiah 28:5-9 (Related)

I know I sound like a stuck record but once again the lectionary has filleted this passage out of its context so as to make it almost incomprehensible. We really can’t make sense of v.5-9 without knowing what is going on in 1-4, and what is going to go on in 10-17. So let’s look instead at the chapter as a whole.

Just in the very early stages of the exile, when most of Israel was living as a vassal state under Babylonian rule, the prophet Hananiah, who is helpfully described by the heading in my Bible as a ‘false prophet’, goes public in the Temple with his prediction that this will all be over within two years, because God is going to break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon (a phrase which he repeats twice for emphasis). It is interesting to note what this will look like in detail: the Temple will be undesecrated again, the sacred articles nicked by Nebuchadnezzar will be returned, the king will be back on his throne, and those who have been deported will come back. In other words, everything will be back to normal. The brief period of oppression will have been a tiny blip in the fortunes of Israel, but life will soon carry on as before.

I’m writing this in the week when lockdown in the UK is being dramatically eased, and on the morning of a day when new charts demonstrate that the global pandemic of coronavirus is still peaking, even if here in England things are calming down a bit. We all want to get back to normal, even though some of us are wondering what the ‘new normal’ will look like. There is a natural human tendency to avoid pain and discomfort, and so it should be – we have names for people who deliberately go out to seek or inflict pain. So Hananiah represents the voice of this human tendency – don’t worry, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, and like Boris after Cumminsgate, we can all just ‘move on’.

But into this understandable human inclination to avoid hardship comes the voice of God, through the genuine prophet Jeremiah. Again, look closely at what he says. First of all he really wants Hananiah’s words to be true. He’d love it if this was going to pan out like that. Jeremiah has a reputation for being a bit of a misery, but he is no more keen on exile and slavery than the next man. However, he senses that God’s purposes are different – the rest of the chapter spells out his view on things. But he also notes something important. Many prophets in the past spoke the unpopular message of war, disaster and plague, and current events seem to be validating their message. Perhaps that is the job of prophets; that’s why we find them so difficult to cope with, and why so often we silence their voices. But what about those who speak peace instead? Jeremiah’s point is that like their more negative brothers and sisters their message needs to be validated by actual events. It isn’t the case that prophets never say good things or bring comfort: just look at Isaiah 40 – 55. But the test is what actually happens. And most of the time it is the prophets of doom who actually turn out to have been speaking from God.

This chapter, then, gives us a meditation on the nature of the prophetic, but also reminds us of an important biblical principle: suffering, unpleasant though it is, can do us good. It can be used by God to shape our characters, to correct our weaknesses, to reorientate our direction and realign our priorities. Everything within us as humans wants to avoid it, but the Bible constantly tells us of its value, and how we should seek the hand of God through it to draw us closer to him.

How have you been praying for our nation and our world during the pandemic? Like all of us I have, of course, been praying for it to go away and leave us alone, but more often I have found myself praying that we would learn the lessons God wants to teach us through it. To return to normal without that happening would be an even greater disaster, I believe.