Author or Sustainer?

Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Lectionary Scripture: Isaiah 40:21-31 (NRSV)

This passage from Isaiah is pretty powerful.  It conveys the hope that the people of God needed after enduring exile from their homeland.  The chapter begins with a famous word of consolation:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

This is good news for a people that were waiting to experience the freedom to govern themselves.  The theology of the day was that the people had dug their own grave so to speak.  Isaiah indicates as much in the passage above.  The exile was a punishment for Judah's sins.  In this way, large events were seen as judgments from God.  God might use pagan nations in order to teach the people a much needed lesson in compassion.

So the people of God saw this larger event in history as an unfolding of God's work in the world.

Object lessons can certainly get our attention.  They are quite memorable.  But sometimes if we don't understand them in the midst of the greater theology of grace, we find ourselves living in despair.

A sense of justice is that the wicked will be punished in this life and the righteous will be rewarded.  We can look in the book of Proverbs and see lots of verses that ascribe to this:

but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it. (2:22)

The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous. (3:33)

The wage of the righteous leads to life, the gain of the wicked to sin. (10:16)

Be assured, the wicked will not go unpunished, but those who are righteous will escape. (11:21)

The wicked are overthrown and are no more, but the house of the righteous will stand. (12:7)

The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous. (15:29)

This is just a quick sample but you can see that the sense of justice has real-world consequences.  The problem with this kind of theology is that we can learn to blame the victim who is already suffering.  The entire book of Job examines this theme.  As we grow deeper in our faith, we can see that sometimes bad things just happen to the unlucky rather than the unrighteous.  

Ecclesiastes mentions this in 7:15: 

In my vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evildoing.

Jesus seems to take up this theme in the Sermon on the Mount where is states in Matthew 5:45: 

for (God) makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

In Luke's Gospel, we hear something similar come from Jesus when he states in 13:4:

Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? 

Sometimes the natural consequence
of our poor behavior is punishment enough!

When this accident happened, there was likely the conversation stemming from interpretation of Proverbs that those who died must have been really sinful for this to happen.  Jesus refutes this kind of thinking.  All of us could come up with things that we've done that could lead to punishment.  The trouble with this kind of theology is that it has us looking for sins for which we must atone rather than concentrating on where God has led us to goodness in our lives.

Of course, we need to ask for forgiveness.  We often may need to do better.  But this repentance comes in the midst of the grace we have received.  It is easier for a child to excel in a home with a loving environment rather than one in which the child is constantly berated.  In a loving environment, discipline is tempered with the confidence of underlying support.

We see that in today's scripture.  God is everlasting and God is not the author of their misery but rather is the one who sustains them, raising them up as on eagle's wings.  Let us run and not grow weary.  Let us walk and not faint.  

In Christ,

Sam

Photo by sharyn morrow via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons license.

All scripture quoted is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.