I am considering these texts through a specific grid today.
Missio Dei comes to Providence on Thursday, and MissionFest Manitoba is in
Winnipeg this coming weekend. With this in mind, I am reading these texts with
missionary eyes. Since I believe that the Bible is a missionary text from
beginning to end, this perspective reveals an essential strand of the passages
we have read.
One word of definition: By missionary, I mean God’s activity
seeking to reconcile the world to himself (as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5).
We participate in God’s reconciling mission as God sends us into this world as
his reconciling agents.
Jeremiah 1
So we turn to Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s call is a curious mixture
of the obvious and the obscure. Hear the passage:
4 The word of the Lord came to me, saying, 5 “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I
appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
6 “Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” 7 But
the Lord said to me, “Do not say,
‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I
command you. 8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with
you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.
9 Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me,
“I have put my words in your mouth. 10 See, today I appoint you
over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy
and overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Note briefly that God appoints Jeremiah as prophet to the
nations. To be “prophet” is to be one who speaks for God to the people. We
might call the prophet, “the mouth of God”. The prophet’s characteristic
beginning for each statement is, “Thus says the Lord.”
Jeremiah responds with excuses reminiscent of Moses when he
was called to go to Pharaoh and demand freedom for God’s people. God’s response
here is decisive, leading to the commission of verses 9 and 10: that God has
put his words in Jeremiah’s mouth (so he really is a prophet); that God will
speak destruction and renewal of all nations and kingdoms through Jeremiah’s
ministry.
So much for the obvious, but there is at least one great
puzzle in these verses. Jeremiah was made “prophet to the nations”. But
Jeremiah spoke the great majority of his prophecies to Judah and concerning
Judah. The final chapters of the book concern the nations, but in general
Jeremiah is (in Wiesel’s words), “the most Jewish of the Jewish prophets.” As
Brueggemann puts it: “the poet of the land par excellence.” What can it mean
then to say that he is “prophet to the nations”? We will return to this
question after we look at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
Luke 4
21 He began by saying to
them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 All spoke well of him and
were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s
son?” they asked.
23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote
this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here
in your hometown what we have heard that you did in
Capernaum.’” 24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in
his hometown. 25 I assure you that there
were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three
and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to
any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in
Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not
one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28 All the people in the
synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him
out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on
which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right
through the crowd and went on his way.
In the verses preceding, on which this passage builds, Jesus
had read the daily Scripture in his home town synagogue—words from Isaiah that
he says here describe his ministry. His friends’ response is curious: “All
spoke well of him.” Wouldn’t that suggest a positive response? Except that they
ask, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Well, the answer is, “Not exactly”, but their
point is something like: “Who does this local boy think he is?”
Jesus responds with the example of Elijah going to a Gentile
widow and Elisha healing a Gentile soldier, although there were many in Israel
who needed their help. For some reason that is not immediately obvious to me,
this response infuriated the people and they tried to throw him off a cliff.
This kind of action suggests that they saw his words as blasphemy.
Reading through the lens of missionary thinking, I want to
focus on what these verses say about the mission of Jesus. There is nothing in
the passage that Jesus read in the synagogue (from Isaiah 61) to suggest that
the coming of God’s Spirit is specifically for Gentiles. Isaiah 60 tells of the
restoration of Zion, which will be for God’s Chosen People (of course), but
also for the nations that come to Zion. So I take the verses Jesus read to
apply first of all to Zion (or the Jews), but also to be shared with the
Gentiles.
Jesus turns this “Jew first, and also the Greeks” (in Paul’s
words) into “outsiders first, who will serve as a spur to the Children of
Israel.” To put it another way, Jesus makes it clear that his ministry, his
call is to God’s people, and that this call includes the ultimate
outsiders—Gentiles.
Synthesis
I think that there is a principle at work here that runs
throughout Scripture and throughout life. God calls people to follow him, but
God’s call is not simply for the benefit of those he calls. The call always
goes beyond one called to include the rest of the world.
Think again of Jeremiah. He prophesies constantly about
Judah. He prophesies to Judah. When the Babylonians offer him a chance to go to
Babylon, he prefers to remain in his ruined land: Judah is his home. When some
rebels in Judah offer him safety in Egypt, he turns them down only to have them
carry him off to Egypt, where he dies. Clearly Jeremiah was a prophet of, for,
and to Judah. But God appoints him to be a prophet to the nations.
I think that what is going on has to do with the way that we
are all interconnected. What God does with Judah, God does also with the world
as a whole. God called Abraham for the sake of the nations (in Genesis 12). God
called the Chosen People to be a nation of priests on behalf of the nations (in
Exodus 19). Jesus came to the Jews in order to save the world.
Elie Wiesel puts it like this: “The prophet of Israel has become the prophet to all nations. He now
understands—and makes others understand—that Israel’s destiny affects everyone
else’s. What happens to Judah will happen to Babylon, then Rome, and ultimately
to the entire world. And so the most Jewish of the Jewish prophets becomes the
most universal among them.”
Missionary
Implication
What does any of this have to do with Missio Dei? Some
simple thoughts:
·
Although we do not all receive a call to speak
God’s word the way that Jeremiah did, still less to set the world free the way
that Jesus did, I believe that God has called each one of us to represent him
in this world. Missio Dei gives you and me a chance to hear that call anew, to
reflect on the call that we have heard—or to hear God’s call for the first
time. The words in Jeremiah are sobering: “Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” This is true for all of us.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that
this call is a comprehensive blueprint in which each step of our lives is laid
out. Rather, God calls us, and has been calling us from the deeps of time, to
follow him.
· Your call
may take you to a church in Altona or to a refugee camp in Turkey. God may lay
your path through Steinbach or through Switzerland. In any case our world is
interconnected, and God’s call in Winkler is part of God’s work in Ethiopia.
And God’s call in Sweden is part of God’s work in Winnipeg.
For this reason I don’t pay much
attention when someone says, “I am not called to be part of God’s mission.” God
calls us all to be part of his mission to reconcile the world with himself.
·
The content of our call requires God’s Spirit
for us to respond. Jeremiah had no ability within himself to carry out the
appointed task. Jesus states explicitly, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
We depend on God’s Spirit to do the work of God.
The message and ministry of
reconciliation takes us into territory completely strange to the people around
us. Selfishness is the natural path. God leads us into a life that is not safe
(consider Jeremiah), but is truly good. Only God’s Spirit can help us walk this
unnatural path. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5: “14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we
are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live
should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for
them and was raised again.”
Conclusion
These
verses link us to 1 Corinthians 13. The essential reason that God goes to so
much trouble in his reconciling mission is his relentless eternal love, which
he seeks to replicate within us. We act naturally out of self-interest. God is
growing God’s love in us, acting out of a desire to honour God and to see all
people reconciled with God. Human love is limited and sentimental; God’s love
is forever, unlimited, flowing from the heart of God through you and me to
God’s world all around us.
PTS Chapel: 2 February 2016
Lectionary: Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
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