Introduction
There
are stories in the Bible that we like, and there are stories we would prefer to
skip. Today we think about two stories we would rather skip, and one passage
that feels good. Exodus 32 tells about the Golden Calf, followed by an outburst
of God’s Wrath. Matthew 22 contains the parable of the wedding feast, with an
outburst of wrath against a poorly dressed wedding guest. Paul’s words of
encouragement at the end of Philippians 4 come as a relief, more the kind of
passage we enjoy hearing. We look at these three passages together and ask what
they have to say to us this morning.
Exodus 22
When
Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Words, the people became impatient,
and Aaron used their gold jewelry to fashion “an idol in the shape of a calf”.
God decided to destroy them and replace them with Moses’ descendants, but Moses
pleaded with God to redeem them instead, for the sake of God’s name.
This
passage is full of material that we don’t have time to examine. For one, why a
calf? Why not a snake (which shows up later)? For another, the idea that Moses
could plead with God and God could relent and extend mercy instead of judgment
is puzzling. I note simply that Moses was clearly in a real relationship with
God, extending to his ability to argue the matter out with God. We can take
courage in our own questions about life. We do not need to be afraid of arguing
with God. If we are in close relationship with God, we can bring our deepest
fears and objections to God – including our objections to the very idea of God.
For this morning, I focus on this basic thought: Grace implies judgment. That
is the trouble with grace.
The
Children of Israel are unable to wait for God, so they try to make their own
form of god to follow, even as Moses receives the word from God: “Do not make any idols” (Ex 34:17) or “You shall not make for yourself an
image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the
waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,
punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth
generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of
those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Ex 20: 4-6)
No
wonder that God sends Moses and Joshua back down the mountain in wrath. No
wonder that Moses calls the Levites to himself to purify the people. No wonder
that they range through the camp killing those who had defiled the very idea of
God with the golden calf. Yet if it is not a surprise, it is still a profound
difficulty for us. Have you ever read this story to a child? Did you then find
yourself trying to avoid leaving the child with the impression that God is
waiting to destroy us in our sleep? The wrath of God is not an easy concept for
us to grasp, and most often we simply avoid it.
Philippians 4
In
the verses from Philippians 4, Paul exhorts the Philippians to steadfast unity,
peace in the midst of conflict, joy in the Lord, and a constant focus on
whatever is good. He makes the exhortation concrete by referring specifically
to Euodia and Syntyche (the meanings of these names may be “Sweet fragrance”
and “Fortunate”), two women in the church whose personal conflict was hindering
the life of the church. He pleads with them “to be of the same mind in the
Lord” – a practical application of his general plea to the church in chapter 2:
1-4.
Paul’s
words in this passage feel better to us: Rejoice in the Lord; Be gentle with
each other; Pray about everything; Experience God’s peace in every area of your
life. This feels good! The closing words in the passage have become a
benediction for many of us: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true,
whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,
whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about
such things.” Finally, Paul wishes us the peace of God in all our lives.
This
passage refers to God the way that we want to think of God: caring, loving,
giver of joy and peace, the one who transforms our lives as we walk in the
unity and love of the Holy Spirit. We see God’s mercy and grace on display, and
it is good! Then we come to the parable in Matthew 22.
Matthew 22
Matthew
recounts the parable of the wedding banquet, in which the invited guests refuse
to come, leading to their destruction, and new guests fill the hall. To this
point in the story, the parable is roughly parallel to the same story in Luke
14: 15-24, but then Matthew adds a hard saying from Jesus. One of the new
guests who did not dress up for the occasion is also destroyed.
Even
in the part roughly parallel to Luke 14, the note of the king’s anger is
prominent. Instead of making excuses, some of the invited guests ignore the
messengers, while the rest respond with hostility, killing the king’s
messengers. In response, the king sends his soldiers, who destroy the invited
guests and their homes.
The
next section parallels Luke 14, as the king sends out his servants to gather
anyone available and bring them into the wedding feast. Here we feel we can
relax: God shows grace and mercy to anyone who will come in! Then the story
takes another dark turn. One guest has not dressed up for the feast, but wore
his regular clothes. We don’t know who he was or what his resources were, just
that he had no answer when he was charged. We know also that the king commanded
his destruction.
Here
God’s grace and mercy are mingled with God’s wrath in a most disturbing way.
The king clearly represents God. Jesus is the messenger who is killed. The Jews
are the ungrateful guests, and the Gentiles are those who are brought in. The
people hearing and reflecting on the parable could make these identifications
easily enough. The failure to wear wedding clothes is more puzzling: What makes
sense to me is that this guest represents someone who thought he could presume
on God’s grace, and instead experiences God’s judgment. So these passages ask
us a difficult question: We know and love God’s grace, but what do we say about
God’s wrath?
Excursus: When I was in seminary, I learned that parables
have one basic point. We are to stick to that point, and not treat them as
allegories. I think that Matthew must not have gone to the same seminary I did,
because he does seem to move towards allegory (compare, for example, the
parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25). Luke had better training
(more like my own background), and the parables he records are generally
cleaner—showing one basic point with perhaps a few secondary points.
Synthesis: We bring these passages
together to say that:
·
God’s
grace is great, beyond imagining.
·
Refusing
God’s grace and choosing “another god” is deadly. There is no other path to
life than God’s grace extended to us.
·
Only
the cross is “strong enough” to deal with the evil of our world.
The Greatness of Grace
We
like the first point. God’s grace and mercy and love are wonderful! We sing and
rejoice as we think of God’s love and mercy in our lives.
Wonderful grace of Jesus, Greater than all my sin;
How shall my tongue describe it, Where shall its praise
begin?
Taking away my burden, Setting my spirit free;
For the wonderful grace of Jesus reaches me.
Refrain:
Wonderful the matchless grace of Jesus, Deeper than the
mighty rolling sea;
Higher than the mountain, sparkling like a fountain, All-sufficient
grace for even me!
Broader than the scope of my transgressions, Greater far than all my sin and shame;
Oh, magnify the precious Name of Jesus, Praise His Name!
Contemporary
Christian music celebrates God’s love and mercy, and the old hymns do the same.
The love of God is greater far/ Than tongue or pen can ever
tell.
It goes beyond the highest star/ And reaches to the lowest
hell.
The guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to
win;
His erring child He reconciled/ And pardoned from his sin.
Refrain:
O love of God, how rich and pure!/ How measureless and
strong!
It shall forevermore endure—The saints’ and angels’ song.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,/ And were the skies of
parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,/ And every man a scribe
by trade;
To write the love of God above/ Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,/ Though stretched
from sky to sky.
God’s
love is extended to everyone. A basic point of the parable in Matthew 22 is
precisely the fact that the servants went out into the streets and brought
everyone into the banquet, “the bad as well as the good”! Most of the guests
accepted the invitation; there was just one guest who came in, but showed by
his lack of respect by not dressing up for the wedding.
This
truth feels good, and we like it. God loves us, and we do nothing to earn that
love. All we have to do is receive God’s love and enter God’s Wedding Feast (a
reference to the fullness of God’s Reign at the end of time). But the fate of
the ungrateful wedding guest – and of the Israelites in Exodus 32 – is more
difficult. They stand “on the other side of God’s grace.”
The Problem with Grace
We
don’t like to talk about judgment or about God’s wrath—“the other side of God’s
grace”. The problem with grace is that it implies also judgment. The wedding
guests who refused the invitation are condemned. The ungrateful wedding guest
is thrown out of God’s realm. The Israelites who worshipped the golden calf are
killed with the sword. All of this is profoundly uncomfortable material, and we
struggle to hear it and accept it.
We
need to understand something about the nature of language. Both OT and NT were
written for people that today we would call “Palestinian Jews”. They were a
Semitic people, with a particular way of expressing themselves. One regular
part of their communication was what we can call “Semitic overstatement”. So in
the Conquest narratives we read that the Israelites destroyed everyone in the
land—and then they worked out how to live with those who remained. This is a
contradiction, unless we recognize the typical overstatement describing the
conquest. Similarly, in Judges 9, Abimelek (Gideon’s son) killed his 70
brothers. The story goes on and tells the story of the youngest son, who
escaped. But again, this is a contradiction, unless we recognize the typical
overstatement in “killed his 70 brothers”.
Jesus
used such hyperbole when he said that we might as well take out our eyes to
keep from using them for evil. So in Luke 14:26 Jesus tells his disciples to
hate their mothers and fathers if they want to be his disciples. Semitic
overstatement: He means simply, “Make following more more important than
anything else in your life.” In Exodus 32, I think we see this pattern in
Moses’ offer of his own life for the people: “Condemn me, but forgive them.” He
is simply pleading with God for the salvation of the people. Again, in Matthew
22, the condemning of all the first guests – as well as the destruction of the
undressed guest – is a strong way of saying: “Rejecting God’s love and grace is
dangerous. Don’t do it!”
Excursus: I read a page on the web claiming that Jesus did
not use hyperbole. “Jesus meant what he said!” The author of the web page then
went on a long explanation of the statement that we are to hate our father and mother
when we follow Jesus and concluded that we are so single-minded in our
discipleship that any other relationship is like “hating”. If the author had
just admitted that Jesus used overstatement for effect, he could have saved a
lot of time and energy!
Let
me restate what I think our passages say in simple straightforward language. God
loves everyone. God extends grace and mercy to everyone. Those who turn their
back on God’s love stand on the other side of God’s grace, which is to court
destruction.
Here
is my definition of God’s wrath, or God’s judgment. God loves all people so
much that God will do whatever it takes to destroy that which stands between us
and God. When our own will, our own choice, stands between us and God, God’s
love – expressed as judgment intent on destroying what stands between us and
God – becomes God’s wrath towards us. God’s wrath is God’s love, intent on
destroying the evil in us.
The Cross
This
explanation of God’s wrath brings us to the Cross. God does not simply move
through our midst with a sword, like the Levites through the Israelites. God
does not simply throw us into outer darkness, where there is weeping and
gnashing of teeth. Instead, God as God is lifted up on the cross, where God’s
wrath acts against the evil of this world. God’s love and mercy combine with
God’s wrath against all that separates us from God – on the cross.
This
love is such an incredible and wonderful gift, that we may wonder why anyone would
reject it and stand on the other side of God’s grace. The reason is fairly
simple: self-will. As C.S. Lewis has said, “There are only two kinds of people
in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God
says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” (The
Great Divorce.) This self-will takes many forms. In Canada and the United
States, most people feel self-sufficient and don’t see their need for God. They
are, perhaps, like the undressed wedding guest.
Receiving
God’s love and grace means that we also have to die: “I am crucified with
Christ.” What does it mean that we also die? Every one of us would choose first
to run our own lives, to be the ruler in our own lives. Accepting God’s love
means also recognizing God as king. God is the ruler of the universe, and God
rules also in our lives. This means a death to self-will, so that we can rise
with Christ in the realm of God. That is what the Israelites failed to do, and
that is what the first wedding guests also refused to do.
Conclusion
I
have a friend whose story I have told before. A brief reminder. Her grandparents
loved Jesus and taught their children to do the same, but her mother chose to
reject their teaching throughout her life. She told me that she flew across the
country to visit her mother about a week before she died. She reported her
mother’s last words to her before she left, “I’ve wrestled with the devil, and
I’ve lost.” Sometime later she was visiting home and her step-father told her
what her mother’s real last words were, just before she died: “I’m going to
Jehovah’s land.”
We
don’t know what happened in that last week, but I have a theory. I think that
when her mother said, “I’ve lost”, she stopped fighting against God. She
stopped insisting on her own way. She gave up, and when she gave up, God was
waiting. God had waited all her life, in infinite love and mercy and grace, and
God gave her the gift of life. “I’m going to Jehovah’s land.” You see, there is
nothing we can do to be among the wedding guests – nothing except to stop
fighting against God in our lives and surrender. You remember another old hymn:
“All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give. … I surrender all.”
Now
there’s a danger with this kind of story. We can turn this surrender into a
highly individual experience, which doesn’t affect our lives. Remember the
wedding guest who didn’t change his clothes. Repentance matters. Community
matters. When we surrender to Christ, Jesus changes us and makes us part of the
church, “the body of Christ.” The passage in Philippians 4 describes the joy
and peace we have together, the way
that we live together. We are God’s
chosen people, bringing God’s peace and joy to the whole world.
The
problem with grace is that God won’t force it on us. God is always there to
give us love and mercy and joy, but God waits for us to give up and hold out
our hands and receive his gift of life.
Grace
Bible Church
15
October 2017
Texts
Exodus
32:1-14
32 When the people saw that Moses
was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and
said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who
brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’
2 Aaron
answered them, ‘Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your
daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.’ 3 So all the people took off their
earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He
took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf,
fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who
brought you up out of Egypt.’ 5 When
Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, ‘Tomorrow
there will be a festival to the Lord.’
6 So the
next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented
fellowship offerings. Afterwards they sat down to eat and drink and got up to
indulge in revelry.
7 Then
the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down,
because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. 8 They have
been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an
idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to
it and have said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of
Egypt.”
9 ‘I
have seen these people,’ the Lord
said to Moses, ‘and they are a stiff-necked people. 10 Now leave me alone so that my anger
may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a
great nation.’ 11 But
Moses sought the favour of the Lord
his God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘why
should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with
great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why
should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to
kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth”? Turn
from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember
your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: “I
will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give
your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their
inheritance for ever.”’ 14 Then
the Lord relented and did not
bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
Philippians
4:1-9
4 Therefore, my brothers and
sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord
in this way, dear friends!
2 I
plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.
3 Yes,
and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at
my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my
co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.
4 Rejoice
in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all.
The Lord is near. 6 Do
not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,
with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends
all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally,
brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right,
whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything
is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. 9 Whatever
you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into
practice. And the God of peace will be with you.
Matthew 22:1-14
22 Jesus spoke to them again in
parables, saying: 2 ‘The
kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent
his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come,
but they refused to come.
4 ‘Then
he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I
have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and
everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.” 5 ‘But they paid no attention and went
off – one to his field, another to his business. 6 The rest seized his servants,
ill-treated them and killed them. 7 The
king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned
their city.
8 ‘Then
he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did
not deserve to come. 9 So
go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” 10 So the servants
went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad
as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. 11 ‘But when
the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing
wedding clothes. 12 He
asked, “How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?” The man was
speechless.
13 ‘Then the king told the attendants, “Tie him hand and
foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth.” 14 ‘For
many are invited, but few are chosen.’
