The Ultimate Love Letter

For our post-Easter preaching ministry at the FreeWay we're working verse-by-verse through the book of 1 John.  Here are the first two sermons in that series:

1 John 1:1-10 "When a What and a How is a Who"

1 John 2:1-11 "But Where's the Love?"

When the North Star of Prayer is Cast into the Sea

One morning on his way to the Temple, Jesus curses a fig-tree because it didn't have out-of-season figs when he was hungry.  After this he enters Jerusalem, enacts a prophetic announcement of God's judgement on Herod's Temple, overturning the money-changer's tables and saying, in effect: "God is about to overturn this whole Temple and the worship-charade it houses, because 'my house was supposed to be a house of prayer for the nations' and you've made it into a monument to your own nationalistic agendas and revolutionary zeal."  Then, on the way back to Bethany in the evening, the disciples discover that the cursed fig-tree has withered, just like Jesus said it would.

Ok:  this would all be confusing enough, but then, when they ask him about the tree, he declares:  "Have faith in God:  truly I say to you that if one has faith, he should say to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and cast into the sea' and if he does not doubt in his heart but he believes that what he says will be so, it will be so for him."  Or something like that. Then he adds:  "Because I tell you this: everything you pray and request, believe that you have received, and it will be so for you."

I've been thinking about this passage a lot over the last little while.  Because it seems to imply that the operative factor in determining whether or not we receive what we pray for is the degree of faith with which we ask-- i.e. the one who believes firmly that they will receive what they've prayed for will receive it; by implication the one who doubts won't; and by further implication, the more strongly you believe the more likely you are to receive. This is, at least, how I've often understood it.  And there are huge pastoral implications for this reading:  do we tell people, explicitly or implicitly, that when they don't receive what they're praying for, it's because they don't have enough faith?  Especially when there's a lot on the line (for a child, perhaps, praying for the healing of a loved one), this can insidiously turn the life of faith, which was meant to be liberating, into a life of bondage and guilt.

So here's what I got: when you read the whole passage (Mark 11:20-25) in context, notice that:  1) Jesus doesn't actually tell us to believe that we will receive, but that we already have received  what we're looking for (the verb tense in v. 24 is aorist, not future); 2) Jesus doesn`t say "ìf you have faith in God" in verse 22, but "have faith in God" (some early manuscripts say "if you have faith" but the most reliable say, simply, "have faith in God") The point:  this is not a "conditional statement" (i.e. you'll be answered if (and only if) you have faith); it's an imperative: "Have faith when you pray.  Believe that you have 'received' and it will be so for you."

Which brings us to note three:  this promise of having received when we pray is embedded right in the middle of Jesus' prophetic announcement that the Temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed.  He acted out its destruction through the whole money-changers demonstration, and then  he symbolically predicted it with the whole fig-tree curse. Just like the fig-tree didn't have fruit when God's Messiah came looking for it, and was destroyed because of it, so too the Temple: it didn't have the "fruit" of righteousness when God's Messiah came to it, so it will be destroyed.  And in as much as the fig-tree did shrivel at a word from Jesus, so too the Temple:  its predicted destruction is assured.

Which brings me to note four.  Jesus tells us that the primary content of our prayer should be that "this" mountain be lifted up and cast into the sea.  I always used to think he was speaking generally and metaphorically; i.e. you could ask for something so impossible as a mountain to be thrown into the sea, and if you've got enough faith, it will happen.  But. Jesus has just pronounced and enacted God's judgment on the Temple-- which is situated on the Temple Mount.  He's actually standing (presumably) in the shadow of the Temple Mount when he utters verse 23. The "this" of "this mountain," it turns out, is a very literal and very specific "this."  He means the Temple Mount.  He's saying, in light of his ominous announcement that the Temple is slated for demolition:  if you have faith, you could say to this Temple (and the Mountain on which it stands) be cast into the sea, and it will be so (v.23):  and once it's so, whatever you pray for will still ascend lovingly and confidently to the gracious ears of God, by faith (v.24).

Why does this context matter?  For a first Century Jew, Herod's Temple is the Spiritual North Star of your whole religious life.  You prayed toward the Temple, as a First Century Jew, because this was where God's Name dwelt.  Your prayers were heard and answered, as a First Century Jew, because God's Name and Glory still "dwelt" in the Temple of Jerusalem.  And Jesus is speaking to First Century Jews when he tells them:  because of its corruption, the Temple is about to be destroyed.

It would be like telling a devout Muslim that Mecca will soon be no more.

Can you hear the anguished reply:  But then how will we pray now?  How will our prayers be heard (let alone answered) now?  By what will we navigate, spiritually speaking, if the lode-star of our spiritual lives is cast into the sea? 

The question throbbing in this passage isn't "what does it take to get my prayers answered?" The question is:  how could we even imagine praying at all, if the Temple is destroyed (which the lesson of the fig tree, well learned, assures us it will be)? Because to pray that this particular mountain be thrown into the sea is actually to pray for a whole new way of coming to God in prayer, period.

And God says:  believe in your heart, and do not doubt, and you will receive exactly that.

Because Jesus says:  "Have Faith in God.  He's doing a new thing in me and through me.  And for those who have faith in me, and through me, the Temple can be cast into the sea, and prayer will not cease; in fact it will have just begun to thrive, because it will no longer be centred around a building made by hands, but will be empowered and filled and transformed by my resurrected and life-giving spirit.  If you believe this, then even before you pray, you will have received the hearing from God that up till now you've assumed is only possible in and through this Temple."

And in answering the question like that, Jesus has made faith, once again, the life of freedom and communion with God that it was meant to be.

Palm Sunday and History

Yesterday was Palm Sunday at the FreeWay, which, outside of "the big two" (Christmas and Easter) is probably my favorite liturgical celebration.  I've blogged before about the significant but often over-looked connections between Christmas and the Triumphal Entry, and how each of the Evangelists handle Jesus' monumental victory parade into Jerusalem slightly differently, drawing out different spiritual, theological and political threads of the story.  I've preached three of the four accounts now-- John, Matthew, and Luke-- and what strikes me is how different and yet identical the view from the Mount of Olives was for each of them.

What I'm thinking about the morning-after Palm Sunday today, however, is how vital this prophetically-loaded donkey ride into Jerusalem is for historically embedding both Jesus of Nazareth and, more significantly, God's act of salvation in and through him.  What I mean is this:  Christmas, and the Incarnation that Christmas celebrates, could have happened anywhere and anytime.  Not really, of course:  Paul says it was at just the right time Jesus came, and Gabriel told Mary that she had found unique favor among God, but even without its specific historical provenance in 1st Century Bethlehem, we could still draw from the Incarnation the theological import that we usually want to draw from it: that the Creator came to his Creation to save it by being born in flesh-and-blood and through the flesh-and-blood of a virgin. 

So too, with Easter-- again, not really: there is a historical necessity to all these events, the where, the when, the who-- but then again an a-historical story about the Creator who loved his Creation so much he willingly died for it to heal and save and forgive it would still make sense to us whether it happened in 1st Century Jerusalem or not.  (And, as a test of this, notice how often our discussions of Easter and Christmas are distinctly a-historical (sometimes almost gnostically so).)

But with the Triumphal Entry it's different.  Who cares that Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem, really, unless the political and spiritual and historical tensions of this time and place and allowed to shine like a spotlight on his mounted figure winding its way down the Mount of Olives?  At least: we have difficulty feeling the theological significance of this story as a story let alone as a saving act of God, until we discover the profound anti-Rome, anti-Herod, anti-Sadducean sentiment in the City, Jesus' allusion to the previous "triumphal entry" by Maccabeus in 164 BC, the historical iimportance of the Temple that Jesus purges, the ache for Shalom that echoes in the Prophetic Tradition of the Hebrew People, and the tragic fulfillment of Jesus'  own prophetic actions when Titus Vespasian demolished Jerusalem some 40 years later, in 70 AD. 

And whatever else it means, the Triumphal Entry reminds us that God's saving acts are deeply embedded in history:  Jesus' donkey is bearing him, not only into Jerusalem, but into the annals of God's salvation-history, and there he reminds us that our God is a God of history, and that an a-historical Gospel is no Gospel at all.

For the record, here's my sermon from Sunday:

Luke 19:28-44 
"A Prophet, the City, its King and his Donkey"