What do you cling to for peace of mind? Familiarity? Family (given and chosen)? Social connections? Do you find security in the customs and traditions observed by the people around you? Are you reassured when the language spoken is one you recognize because it is your first language as well? Do you feel confident because you know you can always count on family and friends to be there for you? And is that what’s important in life? Do you derive your blessed assurance not necessarily from Jesus, but from the relationships you’ve built and the social capital you’ve developed over time?
And is that God’s plan for you – to stay in one place your whole life, to build up social and political walls and defenses, to stay put, watching the world change and grow, while you remain the same, unchanging, stagnant? Is that really God’s plan for you – for you to be, even after many years, still just the same small child you always were to your forebearers?
I don’t think so. I think God wants more from you, to take you to a strange land, to surround you with new people once again, to make you leave everything you know for something completely new, something that only God will reveal to you. What if it’s God’s plan to destroy everything you’ve come to depend on, in order for you to learn to look for God and God alone for help?
That’s pretty tough to accept. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Abraham was seventy-five years old when he heard God’s calling and left Haran (v. 4). What in his seventy-five years could possibly have prepared him to listen to an unseen voice telling him to leave the familiarity of his land, the well-worn customs and traditions of his neighbors, and the security of his father’s house (and his inheritance)?
No irrefutable proof, no convincing evidence, nothing at all, but an unseen voice, told Abraham to go. And he went. He left what he knew, he left his position as the elder of the community, he left what respect he had garnered among his neighbors, he left the house his father had built, for a land as unseen as his God.
Imagine the uncertainty in a decision like that, with no touchstone to hold onto in moments of regret. Imagine the faith he had to have in God to follow a path untrod before. Imagine having to reassure his spouse that he – even though he didn’t know what he was doing – he still felt like this was the right thing to do. He still felt like it was okay to put her life on the line like this, that it was what God was calling him to do.
Imagine waking up every morning and walking for six-to-eight hours to make camp somewhere new that night, because God told you to.
Imagine having to do something like that for a month, or maybe forty days, without any real reassurance that you would end up safe and secure. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it would be like if God said that to you? “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house.” Go to a land that God will show you.
God sent Abraham on a journey with no clear end. Abraham wondered every day if he would find his destination. Each sunrise was filled with wonder, imagining that the gift of God might be made clear to him that day. Each hour was filled with signs of blessings from the Lord, and each sunset was filled with gratitude for what he had seen. Abraham had to imagine, for every day that he journeyed from Haran to the land of Canaan, that he was in the midst of God’s promise.
How might that perspective change a person? Maybe he needed to take that kind of journey in order to believe in the promise God made him, that God would still take care of him, that God would make him into a great nation, and be a blessing to all the nations (Genesis 22:17-18). The people of God would be a blessing to the world.
But the people of God would struggle to have the same faith as their father Abraham. Don’t we all? In the Gospel, we watch as Jesus laments the stubbornness of the people of God, who reject Jesus in the way they reject all the prophets and truth tellers who enter the city gates. They reject him for calling on them to be a light to the nations, a beacon of peace, a bastion of truth. They cling to hatred and to coercion, violence and destruction. The live on lies and can’t see the Word of God when it’s standing right in front of them. We see people acting like that today.
But that’s not God’s plan for us. “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father” in heaven.[i]
Jesus doesn’t reject the people of God, or the Romans occupying the city, or the travelers trading spices and goods. Jesus desires to gather them all up “as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,” not in a sentimental gesture of affection, but in a self-sacrificing embrace, to protect the brood from the threats from the air, predators swiftly diving to catch the vulnerable. The mother hen is defenseless, with her back to the sky – in a brave act of protection that reflects Christ’s love for the world. Maybe you’ve seen someone protect a child that way. Have you ever witnessed someone do that for a stranger? I’m not sure I have.
On Good Friday, we will recall how the people of God reject the Son of God, but they also, not a week earlier, on Palm Sunday, proclaim aloud: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” They see promise in Jesus of Nazareth. They see hope. They feel it.
Maybe they can finally stop settling for things that are not God’s plan for them. And they hear about his message of God’s goodness, which is like nothing we see in the world. But in the end, they do not listen to him. They do not open themselves to God’s grace, which exceeds our grace. They do not agree to make themselves vulnerable to the hatred and violence of the world, forces so prevalent they fill the sky and threaten us all.
In their actions on Good Friday, the people of God declare, without words: “God is of no importance,” and a life is cut short. That same silent, tacit declaration governs our ways, too. It always will – at least, until a day of calamity, until something unthinkable happens, and the people of God and all the world pause in their thinking, and realize instead that “God is of supreme importance,”[ii] that God’s ways are wiser than ours, and that God calls us to repentance once more, if we are able.
So are we able? Are we able to look at our hearts and see our desperate clinging for security and comfort? Are we able to repent from our habits of putting one another down? Are we able to listen more carefully to the Spirit of the Lord calling us to peace and gentleness? Are we able? I pray we are.
May we keep a holy Lent, and wait for the new creation of Easter.
Amen.
[i] Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 88.
[ii] Heschel, Abraham J., and Susannah Heschel. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, p. 163.
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