Weekly Devotional for Lent 2

Scripture text: Luke 3:31-35

Our Friday Bible Study at Canadochly has been spending the past several weeks (and future weeks to come) on looking at the book of Isaiah. It seemed a fitting thing as we moved through the Advent to Christmas to Lent to Easter cycle of the church year to study the Old Testament book that often accompanies us most closely through that journey. Isaiah is, after all, the most quoted OT book in the New Testament.

But beyond all that, it is the story of a prophet. The job of a prophet in the Old Testament was not to be a predictor of future events. They were not soothsayers; they were truth-tellers and there is a difference. The job of the prophet was to warn and to persuade. Beware, for this path that you are on is contrary to God's will and will lead the nation to disaster. Beware, for your neglect of the poor angers God and will lead to your destruction. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and so forth are full of these sorts of passages.

Is it any wonder then why Jesus laments as he does in Luke, "O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it?" Saying such things to the powers-that-be was a sure-fire way to end up on the bad side of any and every king and noble in the land. And you were not likely long for this world after that happened.

Jesus is equally doomed. Unlike the prophets, Jesus lived out God's desires in his own life. A prophet may talk about God's care for people, but Jesus lived it, demonstrated it, showed it to the world. And that was, in many ways, even more aggravating to the powers that be.

The powerful and ambitious in any society have always cultivated their power by dividing people against one another. Hitler is easily the most extreme example, with the Holocaust of the Jews and the often banal acceptance of it by society. But modern would-be leaders are not always as different as they pretend to be. Scratch the surface of many in this election cycle and you'll hear talk similar to this "Trust me, because I'll protect you from 'those people' over there who are different from you." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But for Jesus, what mattered was not the anger of the powerful, but the love of God. And the idea that "God loves everyone" was not merely some pipe-dream or idealistic thinking, it is the truth. Jesus embodied that. He ate with tax collectors. He healed the lepers. He associated with prostitutes, the poor, and sinners of all stripes. His followers and closest associates were a who's-who of the "those people" of his day. Above anything else, that was what doomed him to the cross and he knew it. He did it anyway.

Like the prophets before him, he did it anyway. Why? Because the work was too important to be thwarted by the threats of the ambitious and powerful. The Gospel needed to be proclaimed as far and wide as possible. God loves you. God accepts you. God wants you to be his. You are precious to him, loved beyond words. In fact, God loves you so much that would even die for you, such a thing that should otherwise be impossible. Nothing else matters to God but his people. ALL his people, you included.

The torch has passed from Christ to his church and little has changed. We too are called to embody God's love to the world and that task is not without risks. It requires us to face the Other who we are taught to fear. It requires us to stand up to the powerful and their followers who would tell us those Other are not worth the effort. But they are. They were for the prophets. They were for Jesus. And they are for his Church. Why? Because God's love will not be denied. Amen.