Your Thoughts Are Not My Thoughts
3rd Sunday in Lent
Art Piece: “Parable of the Barren Fig Tree” By Ludovico Mazzolino
Someone once quipped that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Today’s lectionary texts, filled with recurrent themes of Israel’s history – divine nourishment, spiritual life and death, exile, covenant, repentance and redemption, and above all national exceptionalism – “rhyme” with each other. Isaiah, celebrating the return from exile, remembers God’s covenantal love for David. Psalm 63, written by David, has a whiff of the desert, a theme that Paul in his letter to the Corinthians makes explicit. Jesus, in lecturing the crowd and the temple authorities, refers both to recent events and to the patriarchs. Simply put, these texts outline the history of God’s relationship with the Jews, from the Abrahamic covenant through the return from exile.
Jesus admonishes the crowd that unless they repent, they will perish like the Galileans slaughtered by Pilate or the eighteen killed by the collapse of the tower of Siloam. He has reason to be irritable. He knows that he’s on his final march towards Jerusalem. He admits to feeling the stress of the “baptism” awaiting him. Herod wants to kill him. The synagogue leaders are furious with him for healing on the Sabbath. The scribes and Pharisees lay traps for him. But Jesus is not just ventilating. He warns of catastrophes to come. In his Lent for Everyone – Luke, Year C, N. T. Wright compares Jesus to a fireman fighting a raging fire, urging people to leave the building lest they die. This is not the crabby Jesus, this is the prophetic Jesus, sounding a final alarm.
Why is the establishment so mad at him? Perhaps because Jesus challenges their self-assurance of what it means to be God’s chosen people. Later in the chapter, he says “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out. Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and take their places at the banquet in the kingdom of God.” Election does not lie in lineage. The Jews may find themselves at the back of the line (or left out altogether). The Lord expects justice, mercy and righteousness from His people, and neither ethnicity nor fidelity to ceremonial law are enough. The kingdom of God will be populated with spiritual, not genetic or cultural, heirs to the patriarchs. To drive the point home, Jesus uses the metaphor of the fig tree, a popular Hebrew Bible symbol for Israel and Judah (and, in Micah 7, a powerful symbol for a fruitless, desolate Israel.) Chop it down, Jesus says.
Now turn to Isaiah 55, which starts off talking about, of all things, food: food that you pay for but doesn’t satisfy versus free food that is rich and delightful. Of course, it’s not just food; it’s authentic life in God, the full enjoyment of the covenant that God made with David. God calls on the people of Israel to return and accept His abundant pardon. Having been glorified by the Lord, the Israelites will be endowed with splendour, and nations from all directions will come running to join. Wright, in The Day the Revolution Began, equates this to an exodus for Gentiles, God’s love for Israel transformed into love for the world through Israel. However, redemption and glory come with a catch. Redemption requires repentance. “Let the wicked forsake their ways / and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.” The banquet is not completely free.
Jesus delivers a similar message in the synagogue. Israel has not kept its end of the bargain. It has not repented. To drive the point home, Jesus pauses his teaching and almost casually cures a crippled woman. When the outraged leaders of the synagogue upbraid him for healing on the Sabbath, Jesus’s response returns to the theme of nourishment: leading a domestic animal to water on the Sabbath, planting a mustard seed, adding yeast to flour, and feasting in the kingdom of God.
There is a long tradition of belief in American exceptionalism. Like Israel, America has an exceptionalist mythos. It has its own gallery of patriarchs: Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Indeed, the nation’s Great Seal has the phrase Annuit Coeptis: “he favored our undertakings.” (Look at the back of a dollar bill.) Scholars trace this exceptionalist tradition to a foundational American text, John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” sermon delivered to the Puritan colonists as they left England. Winthrop, invoking Nehemiah, compares the New England settlers to the Jews returning from exile. Their community was to be an example for the world, a “city upon a hill.”
However, the opportunity with which God blessed the Puritans came with an obligation. Just as Isaiah calls on Israel to repent, Winthrop tells his flock what is required for the enterprise to succeed: “Follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon, then, was, in the manner of Jesus in the synagogue, a warning. Failure, Winthrop says, would bring shame on the Puritans, and on God. Winthrop ends by quoting Moses from Deuteronomy 30, urging his group to choose life by keeping God’s ways, so as to enjoy His blessings.
We should listen carefully. We presume our national exceptionalism by virtue of inheritance, not righteousness. In ways we dimly remember, that tradition is rooted in Winthrop’s vision of the new Jerusalem. Have we forgotten the warning that Winthrop issued? Has America done any better than the Israelites at living up to its exceptionalist view of itself?
Your opinion is as good as mine about that one. But I doubt that a national personality test would reveal “humility” as America’s dominant trait. In fact, exceptionalism, American style, has morphed into empire, something Winthrop never could have envisioned, let alone hoped for. Winthrop thought the Puritans had a God-given opportunity, together with a holy obligation, andurged his community to be humble, not self-righteous.
Exceptionalism and humility lie at the opposite ends of the personality scale. Chosen people are hubristic, not humble, imposing their will on all, even at the point of a sword. Today’s readings, however, warn us that when the tower falls, it falls on all of us. Israel’s history, both in exile and again in Jesus’s time, cautions that we are not insulated from the consequences of injustice towards migrants or neglect of the homeless and hungry. Rome’s fate warns against colonial misadventures and constant military conflict.
Walter Brueggemann, in his Reality, Grief, Hope, urges us to live in a counter-narrative to the national exceptionalism (including its colleagues, market ideology and military superiority) narrative. The counter-narrative would be local, not national, grounded in Scripture rather than politics, characterized by individual acts of mercy and justice, like Jesus’s healing in the synagogue, rather than grand programs. The counter-narrative finds its home in the church rather than the state, because it is based on things the church does best: local acts of charity, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, keeping company with the lonely. Brueggemann writes “When it is faithful, the church – the local congregation as the defining unit of faith – is committed to an alternative neighborly practice of the world. It does so in the face of shrill, insistent reductionism that wants to eliminate the inconvenience of neighborly obligations.”
We don’t know where the American story ends. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. A Gentile, the Persian king Cyrus, delivered Judah from exile. Everyone agrees that we’re at a crisis point, exiled from what’s best and true about ourselves. It’s a pretty good bet that nationalism, militarism, and consumerism will not be what save us. History rhymes indeed.
Christians believe that the story of God is a great epic poem, heading to a glorious conclusion. Epics, however, contains much suffering and loss. Is our small portion of God’s history pastoral, tragic, or (God forbid) elegiac? Time will tell.