When challenged by five year olds…
Isaiah 43: 16-21 & John 12: 1-8
When Jesse (our 5 year old) is looking thoughtful at bedtime I know I’m in trouble. He has been concocting a big question, and has decided now is the time to deliver it. This week was a tough one. ‘Daddy, why doesn’t God love everyone?’
‘He does Jesse, very much.’
‘Not everyone.’
‘Yes Jesse, very much. Night night now darling, let’s pick this up in the morning yeah?’
‘Well then why did he kill the Egyptian soldiers when Moses was escaping in the sea?’
‘Ah well, right, I see, well, ah, it’s complicated…’
It is complicated, isn’t it? The story of our scriptures, the story of our faith.
How do you explain to anyone, let alone a 5 year old, that the Old Testament is a patchwork of myth and history and poetry and exaggeration? a theological matrix laid over the story of a people who chart their relationship with God across thousands of years. The Church of England has been around for about 500 years and we haven’t stood still in our understanding of God and each other, nothing like it.
It is the same, of course, with the development of the Hebrew scriptures, all the time undergoing a process of reflection, layering on expectation and experience, sifting through all this for the grains of wisdom that resonate with the truth of God. What was cheered as the voice of the divine in one generation was reviewed, seen in a very different light by the next, as they gained more insight into the unfathomable depths of the mystery of the living God.
So it is with the story of Exodus, where the Egyptians take the form of the ultimate baddies: unthinking, unreasonable, so easy to hate. They are like expendable extras in a Bond film; no-one minds the Egyptian army being sunk in the Red Sea because as characters they’re two-dimensional, undeveloped, barely real.
But, and this is so important, BUT the faith of the Jewish people does not stand still. While on the one hand Exodus tells us that the waters of the Red Sea closed over the chariots and riders of the Egyptian army and good riddance to them, on the other hand in the prophecy of Isaiah we have a contrasting voice. In this morning’s reading from Isaiah 43 we see, creeping into the picture, a more complicated story than we might have first thought.
Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the might waters,
who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior,
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
We see so many basic human instincts at play in the stories told by the books of Exodus and Joshua- the ones that go, ‘my side is good, your side is bad’, the ones that generally end in the wiping out of one population by another.
For many people this remains an attractive thing to believe, as popular today as ever. You’ve got to put yourself first, and other people second. How else could you ever be great again?
But Isaiah’s prophecy qualifies, challenges, circumvents. There will be redemption again through the waters, Isaiah says, but this will be a new spring of water for a new people, not one nation over another but a people gathered from every corner of the earth.
Today is called Passion Sunday. It is not, if you like, the beginning of the end for us in Lent, but it is the end of the beginning. You might have noticed that the images at the entrance to the church and the entrance to the Lady Chapel have been veiled, as has the processional cross. That’s because from now we are supposed to focus solely on the cross that is to come, the cross that Jesus carries on Good Friday. We will hear again the story of the suffering of Christ, which is why these two weeks are called Passiontide, deriving from the Latin for suffering- passio.
What’s the point of it? Jesus did it once, isn’t that enough? Well yes and no.
We celebrate Holy Week each year because it reminds us of the way God fulfils the words of Isaiah. We are about to witness again the new thing God brings forth; the spring of the water of life that flows from the side of Jesus when he is pierced by the lance of a Roman soldier. And this is a new thing, make no mistake.
The waters are closing in and death is coming. The Exodus story is playing out again. But punishment isn’t coming for the enemies of God; the selfish, the sinful, the scorning. There will be no smiting of Pharaoh’s army this time around. No, instead God opens his arms, is hammered into place, and dies, praying ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do.’
We don’t know what we do. That is the heart of the Christian faith. We live in a cloud of illusion that we are in control of ourselves. We are not, and sin creeps in and distorts what we want. St Paul, that most piercing of self-critics puts is best in Romans 7:15 when he says ‘I do not understand my own actions- I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.’ It is on the cross that Christ unwinds our distorted and foolish ways, turns us around and opens to us the gift of grace by which all our wounds are healed.
That’s Passiontide; that is what’s to come. So do come. Take part in the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Holy week, walk with Christ and bear witness to that which only he can do. If I believe nothing else I believe this; that if the world were truly converted by the cross of Jesus it would look nothing like the world we live in now. So it is my job to be converted again and again to God I see on the cross, foretold all those years ago by Isaiah.
Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the might waters.
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Because, as I said to Jesse, God does in fact love us all, so very much.