Stephen
Terry, Director
Sharing
God's Mission
Commentary
for the October 28, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson
"This
is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your
actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words
and say, 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of
the Lord!' If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each
other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow
and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other
gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I
gave your ancestors for ever and ever." Jeremiah 7:3-7, NIV.
The current context of what has been
happening in the Levant is an eye opener to this week's lesson for the covenant
central to this lesson, the eponymous Abrahamic Covenant detailed in Genesis,
chapter 12, is the basis for modern Israel's claim to Palestine. It is a claim
that not only resonates with many Jews who have long sought refuge from persecution.
It also resonates with fundamentalist Christians who believe that God will
never abandon the Jews and that the temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem to
herald the return of Jesus. Both parties are tempted to rejoice at the potential
to finally wipe the Palestinian people from the map so that the Jews can fully
reclaim their land and get started on that temple. As a result, Israel and the
United States are locked in a macabre tango of death and destruction for no
other reason than that the Jews claim to be God's chosen people and far too
many fundamentalists buy into that narrative without question.
Faced with the reality of an
attack on Jewish civilians where Hamas murdered the elderly, women, children,
young concert goers and anyone else they could destroy, instead of realizing it
was their own ill-prepared military that allowed it to happen, they began to repay
the favor by also destroying innocents as collateral damage to strikes on Hamas
in Gaza. Then to up the ante, they cut off food, water, and electricity to
Gaza, including medical facilities. They claim to be waging lawful warfare but
targeting infrastructure and medical facilities despite the harm this can cause
to innocents is not what the rules of warfare allow as developed over the last
seventy years. We have come to expect such indifference and injustices from
autocracies, but we have been taught since childhood that democracies live by a
different light, the light of justice.
We, in the United States, have
had to face our own demons in this regard. The firebombing of Dresden and the
atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki swept over 150,000, many innocent
non-combatant civilians, into graves. We did that. Such devastation and
injustice led us to the 1949 Geneva Convention to prevent such events ever
happening again. Millions lost their lives during the Second World War. Over
six million of them were Jewish civilians. If anyone could understand the injustice
of that, one would think the Jews could. Yet, here we are today as though we
have all learned nothing. When I see a mother lying next to her child in a hospital
bed in Gaza, both bloodied and broken from the destruction of their home, my
heart breaks. But it breaks not just from the horror for that mother and child.
It breaks for Israel as well. I ask myself what part of the prophet Jeremiah's
words do they not understand? "If you do not oppress the foreigner, the
fatherless, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place...then I
will let you live in this place."
When Jeremiah prophesied in
Jerusalem, so much evil was taking place that during Manasseh's reign the
streets were said to flow with the blood of the innocent. God could not ignore
that evil and despite his promise to Abraham, he did not intervene when Babylonians
sacked the city, destroyed the temple built by Solomon, and carried much of its
wealth and its citizenry back to Babylon where they remained for seventy years.
Then Daniel's prayer of national repentance on behalf of the Jews marked a turning
point when God could support their return to Israel. One would think that they
would have learned justice, mercy, and compassion as a result, but instead,
they murdered the Messiah and persecuted and murdered his followers. As a
result, the temple built to replace Solomon's Temple and later improved by
Herod was destroyed and no temple has been rebuilt since. This has not stopped
religious Jews and fundamentalist Christians from believing that a third temple
will be built and will usher in the coming of the Messiah. But they miss the
context that allowed the construction of the second temple. Repentance for the
injustices and bloodshed of the past made it possible. There has been no
repentance by either Jews or Christians that would halt the injustices and the
bloodshed that never seem to stop.
Zacchaeus, the diminutive tax collector who hosted Jesus at
his home, "stood up and said to the Lord, 'Look, Lord! Here and now, I give
half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of
anything, I will pay back four times the amount.'" (Luke 19:8) Jesus responded,
"Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of
Abraham." (verse 9) It is not being a biological descendant of Abraham that
makes one a party to the covenant with Abraham. It is the condition of one's
heart whether it is filled with bitterness and revenge or compassion and mercy.
Whatever was the state of his heart before, after his encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus
had the latter. Just as today, the Jews of Christ's day claimed descent from Abraham
and heirs of that covenant, a claim referred to often in our day as
justification for their return to Israel. But Jesus rebuked them for believing
this. He said, "And do not think you can say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as
our father.' I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for
Abraham." (Matthew 3:9)
In a way, we are seeing a repeat
of Israel's experience in Christ's day. They did not learn justice and mercy because
of their Babylonian captivity. They believed that because they had the temple
and the ongoing sacrifices that God's favor rested on them. They confused their
will, politically and morally, to be the equivalent of God's will. Whenever
anyone rose to challenge that, they did so at the risk of martyrdom like John
the Baptist, and eventually even Jesus. The exile that resulted from the bloodshed
that occurred under Manasseh did not stop them from shedding innocent blood. It
brought a curse upon their nation and stopped the very sacrifices they were relying
on to appease God as though he were a pagan deity who would reward them for the
massive slaughter of those animals and ignore the way they treated one another.
In the early church, Christians
recognized the problem, and we are told they shared everything and cared for
those in need.[i] Like Zacchaeus, they had a
heart of repentance and compassion that allowed them to be grafted on to the Abrahamic
Covenant, not by birth, but by the creative, restorative act of God. It is hard
to fathom how sacrifices came to replace mercy in the hearts of the Jews.
Revenge seems to be a guiding principle in modern times. Perhaps the spirit of
revenge spawned when six million were lost in the Holocaust. Doubtless this may
have caused them to seek the security of their own homeland and spurred the
return to Israel for that purpose. But the land cannot protect them. It did not
save the ten tribes from Assyria. It did not save the remnant from Babylon. It
is only dirt. There is no magical property to it. Only being in a right relationship
with God makes a difference. And that relationship is based on mercy, not
sacrifice. Otherwise, the innocent die. As Jesus said quoting the prophet
Hosea, "If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not
sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the innocent." (Matthew 12:7)
Knowing full well the results of
collateral war damage on the innocent, Israel has condemned the innocent
anyway. They know the pain from what Hamas inflicted upon them, and they are
eager to inflict it as well. It would be naive to believe that the Jews have any
respect for the words of Jesus. They do not recognize him as the Messiah. But
Christians claim to, and some Christians are just as eager as the Jews to see
the Palestinians get their share of pain. Israel may be severing their tie to
the Abrahamic Covenant by shedding so much blood. But Christians, who are only
grafted onto that covenant through Christ, should think long and hard about the
shedding of innocent blood and placing themselves under the same curse that has
plagued the Jews throughout history. We often hear Americans claim that God favored
us with our country in the new world. But if we want him to "let us live in this
place," we are going to need to stop going down the path of injustice and indifference
to the cries of the innocent. God will never abide that.