Jason Micheli's Blog, page 12
April 18, 2025
You Are Finished
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Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Hebrews 9.15-28
In the middle of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus sizes up the state of God’s covenant people with a parable. According to Jesus, it’s really an allegory.
“Living in the Kingdom, living with me,” Jesus says, “it’s like this…”
A farmer sowed good seed in his field, wheat. Every which way you look over his acreage its amber waves of grain. But then one night, while his farmhands are fast asleep in the bunkhouse, the farmer’s enemy slips through the barbed-wire fence and scatters bad seed. The enemy sowed weeds among the wheat.
And the word Jesus uses for weeds is zizania.
It’s scientific name is Lolium temulentum.
In English, it’s darnel, an annual grass that, with its long, slender awns, or bristles, looks so much like wheat you could scarcely distinguish between the two.
When the plants come up and mature and the farmhands discover the fields aren’t as pure and unsullied as they had assumed, they go to the boss and say, “Sir, did you purchase, did we plant, bad seed? How come your fields are covered in weeds?”
“An enemy hath done this,” the boss answers rather cryptically.
“Alright then,” the farmer’s hired hands respond, “I suppose it’s our job now to go and pull up the weeds in your fields.”
“No, no, no,” the farmer replies, “Don’t you dare lift a finger where the weeds are concerned. You boys don’t have nearly the eyes you think you do. You start in there trying to pull up the weeds you’ll tear out the wheat too without realizing it and before long the whole farm will be ruined. You just leave the weeds alone. Leave the bad seeds to me. Let the wheat and the weeds grow up together. I’ll take care of it at the harvest when I give the reapers a ring.”
As soon as Jesus pulls Lazarus up from corruption in the earth, like a dormant tulip bulb, the high priest Caiaphas sees the threat Christ’s resurrection power will pose to the Principalities and Powers. Worried about his people’s fragile peace with Rome, Caiaphas reasons, “It is better that one man should die rather than the whole nation should perish.” So to speak, he’s simply looking out for all the plants in the field. Therefore, while Martha and Mary plug their noses and embrace their previously dead brother and while the astonished Lazarus pulls off his burial clothes, Caiaphas sets in motion the plot to make Mary’s boy Pilate’s victim.
Caiaphas, along with the other priests who rend their garments, weeping over his apparent blasphemy— they thought they were simply tearing away a weed that threatened the wheat. As it turns out, they crucified the LORD of the Harvest. They thought they were weeding when in fact they killed the Farmer. Taking the field into their own hands, they picked up a hammer and nailed him to a tree.
Just as Jesus prophesied his death with parables, after his death the apostles retold it by way of Israel’s story. And so the Gospels tell every detail of his passion in such a fashion that it refers back to their scriptures.
Those who bear witness against Jesus are false. This is the precise lament of those who suffer unjustly in the psalms.
Jesus remains silent under accusation; he suffers smiting and spitting. In this way, he resembles Isaiah’s suffering servant.
Soldiers throw dice for his clothes and passersby mock his naked shame. In so doing, they all unwittingly reenact the psalms.
He reenacts the psalms as well.
The cry of dereliction in Psalm 22.
The cry of thirst in Psalm 69.
The cry that is the commendation of the spirit in Psalm 31.
On his cross, Christ recapitulates them all.
We tend to use the language of fulfillment. The Gospels litter his path to Golgotha with Old Testament citations because his passion consummates these scripture passages— we suppose. Jesus even appears to speak as though he achieves their fulfillment. “Tetelestai,” he announces from his cross. “It is finished.” Of course, seldom do we probe to what precisely Jesus referred with that word it.
The language of fulfillment is perhaps too strong. We hear it as laudatory. As though, finally, everything was accomplished according to plan. But by making all their exegetical connections between his cross and their scriptures, the evangelists do not intend to praise Christ so much as to indict the covenant people.
Fulfill is the wrong word.
Denouement is the better word.
In Greek tragedy, the denouement is the moment when the plot’s villainy is finally exposed. His path to Calvary is strewn with the scriptures because this where the vocation of God’s elect people has led: to the death of God. This is why Gospel of John’s final plain allusion to the Old Testament (“Not one of his bones will be broken.”) hearkens to the terrible words from the prophet Zechariah: “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd…, that my sheep may be scattered. I will turn my hand against the little ones…When they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn.”
The passion story is the denouement of Israel’s story. The storyline of God’s set apart people leads to the murder of the LORD of the Harvest. Christ’s path to the cross is littered with Old Testament references because the death of Jesus is the death of Israel. He contains in himself the multitudes of dry bones the LORD unveiled to the prophet Ezekiel. “Son of man,” God says to Ezekiel, “these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.””
In rooting out what they took to be a threatening weed, God’s people reap nothing but the ultimate ruination of their vocation.
The death of Jesus is the death of Israel.
The death of Israel is the death of the covenant.
The covenant is the it in “It is finished.”
Just so—
The crucifixion is not a sacrifice.
In Cormac McCarthy’s greatest novel Blood Meridian, the antagonist called only the Judge is a malevolent, violent character who unleashes his appetites upon the world. At one point in the macabre story, the Judge asks with malicious wit:
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?”
The only good in Good Friday is the audacious claim that God in the Son through their Spirit has done to the degeneracy of mankind exactly so.
“He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace…”
The verbs in the fourth and final Servant Song (pierced, crushed, oppressed, afflicted, slaughter) are not cultic terms; that is, they do not refer to a Mosaic sacrifice. Moreover, the song compares the Servant to a sheep prepared for shearing, but sheep prepared for sacrifice in the temple were not sheared. For that matter, animals presented to God in the temple were not to be altered, abused, or disfigured in any way as this would make them unfit gifts to offer to God. And nowhere does scripture posit the animals sacrificed to the LORD in the temple as objects of divine wrath.
The one animal scripture does stipulate as an object of God’s anger, the one animal that does have the people’s sins and guilt imputed onto it, is the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement. Critically, the scapegoat is not sacrificed. The scapegoat cannot be sacrificed. The scapegoat bears the sins and guilt of all the people. Therefore, it cannot be sacrificed because a sacrifice can only be offered in the presence of God in the tabernacle, the place where neither sin nor guilt can go. The whole purpose of the scapegoat is to bear the sins and guilt of the people far away from God’s presence. Only then may the high priest enter into the holy of holies and offer an atoning sacrifice.
The Servant Song does not sing about a sacrifice.If so, what are we to make of the promise unveiled to the prophet Isaiah? What do we do with those verbs— pierced and crushed, afflicted and oppressed? Slaughtered? If the commandments forbid the abuse of sacrificial animals, what are we to make of the lamb, beaten and spat upon and nailed to a tree? If Golgotha is not a sacrifice, then what is it? If Mary’s boy is more than Pilate’s victim— if he is not merely the passive object of divine or human wrath, then what work does Jesus do between noon and three on a Friday afternoon?
Nearly six centuries before Christmas, the LORD exiled his elect people from Israel to Babylon. Like Jesus in the Garden the evening before Good Friday, God handed them over. The LORD even allows his “servant,” the pagan King Nebuchadnezzar, to destroy God’s dwelling place on earth, the temple in Jerusalem.
For his people’s idolatry and unfaithfulness, disobedient greed and contempt for the poor, God exiles them to a pagan land. The LORD says to them, You want to live like a pagan? Go live with the pagans. There by the rivers of Babylon, under the curses of the covenant they did not keep, the LORD refuses to accept the sacrifices his people attempt to offer to him.
A generation into their exile, the Word of the LORD comes to the prophet Isaiah and promises a divinely-ordained turn from anger to mercy. Isaiah prophesies a Servant, an Israelite for all of Israel, whose suffering and death will have a special extra-sacrificial role in the dynamics of God’s covenantal relationship with his people. This Servant’s vicarious suffering and death will reboot the covenant relationship when it is so broken no sacrifices can be offered. After all, biblically speaking, the purpose of sacrifice is to maintain the people’s relationship with God, and there is no surer sign of that relationship’s brokenness than the people’s high priest declaring to Pontius Pilate on Good Friday, “We have no king but Caesar!”
The Suffering Servant is not a sacrificial offering.The Servant is the substitute necessary to restore the covenantal sacrifice.He is not a guilt offering.He is guilty— he carries in himself all our sins.And he bears them away.Just as the mob screams at him, “Take him away!”
He is not a sacrifice.
He is a substitute.
The Servant bears our sins away.
So far away from the presence the Father that he descends even to the grave.
He drags our guilt and trespass, all of it, to the depths of the very opposite of God: Death. When the Son cries out with Psalm 22 “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?” by their own triune decision, Jesus has traveled further from the Father than any scapegoat could ever venture.
With the Father, through their Spirit, God the Son submits to the degeneracy of mankind to take it away, to reverse the curse, and restore the covenant, making it possible once again for a high priest to offer sacrifice on his people’s behalf.
Only now, God’s people have a different high priest in heaven.
That selfsame Servant.
Jesus the Friend of Sinners.
As New Testament scholar David Moffitt writes:
“Jesus’ first appearance on earth was for the purpose of bearing sins away, which required being away from his Father. His appearance before the Father in the heavenly tabernacle allows him, as the great high priest, to offer himself to God as the sacrifice that makes atonement and to intercede on behalf of his siblings.
The Son, then, died on earth bearing sins. By his resurrection and ascension, he returned to his Father to offer himself as the perpetual sacrifice that purifies, perfects, and sanctifies his people while they wait to enter their inheritance.”
The crucifixion is not a sacrifice.
The cross is the substitution when sacrifices no longer work, when anyone else might look upon God’s people’s performance of their covenant obligations and declare, “It is finished.”
When Jesus prophesies his death, he does so with parables.
Like the story he spins just before he predicts the destruction of the temple:
“Once upon a time, there was a fat cat who bought a vineyard up in Napa. When it came time for harvesting the grapes, the vineyard owner sent some of his interns up north with a message, and dammit if the fruit pickers didn’t beat one, kill another, and stone still another. The rich guy, though, he’s an odd one. The owner of the vineyard doesn’t react the way you might expect.
He doesn’t call the police, disappear them to El Salvador, or take his helicopter up to Napa to take matters into his own hands. No, he hands over another message and sends another company car full of overachieving interns to the vineyard.
But the fruit pickers do the same to them too. They zip tie them to the grapevines and beat the life out of them. Fool me once, fool me twice— would you believe this fat cat didn’t learn his lesson with these rotten, no-good workers? Seriously, he tells himself, “If I give the message to my son, if I send my son up there, surely, they’ll listen to him.” As soon as they hear the kid’s car coming up the gravel drive, the fruit pickers look to each other and say, “This awol vineyard owner is never going to come around here. If we off his son, we can have this place to ourselves.” So they take him across the property line and kill him.” “Now,” Jesus says to his listeners, “What do you reckon this father will do when he learns they’ve murdered his son in a shameful fashion and left his body in the brush, forsaken like trash? Messenger after messenger, what do you guess this father will do after they’ve killed his ultimate message-bearer?”
“Surely, he will put those wretches to a miserable death!” they answer so fast not a one even raised their hand.”
Surely, that is what we would do.
But that is not what the triune God does to his wretched humanity.
On Good Friday, God in Christ does what we would never guess.The Vineyard Owner becomes a Servant and bears it all away.He reverses the curse. He takes away all our trespasses into the outer darkness so that what was broken can be mended and what is mended can be maintained.Ever since my battery of tests came back in December, life has reacquainted me with my mortality. Twice a day I self-administer chemotherapy and a fist-full of pills. No one gets out of life alive, but when you choke down the fact of it four times every day you realize the truth about yourself.
I need more than a Substitute for my guilt.I need more than a Savior from my sins.And so do you.You need a Priest whose prayers you can be damn sure get heard.Because even on my best day, I am not who the Word worded me to be.So hear the good news.
We have no bread and wine tonight. We have no water. But we need neither since the gospel itself is the word in which Christ gives himself to us.
Hear his good news:
Good Friday is not the dead center of the gospel.
Good Friday is only one part of Jesus Christ’s work.
For you.
Good Friday simply inaugurates the new age of Atonement.
Because of Good Friday, Christ Jesus is today and tomorrow and the next day until the end of days interceding for you with the Father, working on you in the Spirit, and through the Word he is fashioning you as though a new creation. One day, even his wicked tenants and foolhardy laborers will be transformed into the likeness of the LORD of the Harvest. Surely, Mary’s boy will settle at nothing less before he finally declares, “It is finished.”
“You are finished.”
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The passion and death of Jesus
18:1After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.
18:2Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place because Jesus often met there with his disciples.
18:3So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.
18:4Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, "Whom are you looking for?"
18:5They answered, "Jesus of Nazareth." Jesus replied, "I am he." Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.
18:6When Jesus said to them, "I am he," they stepped back and fell to the ground.
18:7Again he asked them, "Whom are you looking for?" And they said, "Jesus of Nazareth."
18:8Jesus answered, "I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these people go."
18:9This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, "I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me."
18:10Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest's slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave's name was Malchus.
18:11Jesus said to Peter, "Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?"
18:12So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him.
18:13First they took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year.
18:14Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.
18:15Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest,
18:16but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in.
18:17The woman said to Peter, "You are not also one of this man's disciples, are you?" He said, "I am not."
18:18Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.
18:19Then the high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching.
18:20Jesus answered, "I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret.
18:21Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said."
18:22When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, "Is that how you answer the high priest?"
18:23Jesus answered, "If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?"
18:24Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest.
18:25Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, "You are not also one of his disciples, are you?" He denied it and said, "I am not."
18:26One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, "Did I not see you in the garden with him?"
18:27Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.
18:28Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate's headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover.
18:29So Pilate went out to them and said, "What accusation do you bring against this man?"
18:30They answered, "If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you."
18:31Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law." The Jews replied, "We are not permitted to put anyone to death."
18:32(This was to fulfill what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die.)
18:33Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?"
18:34Jesus answered, "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?"
18:35Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"
18:36Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to world. If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here."
18:37Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."
18:38Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, "I find no case against him.
18:39But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?"
18:40They shouted in reply, "Not this man but Barabbas!" Now Barabbas was a rebel.
19:1Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.
19:2And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe.
19:3They kept coming up to him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and striking him on the face.
19:4Pilate went out again and said to them, "Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him."
19:5So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, "Behold the man!"
19:6When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."
19:7The Jews answered him, "We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God."
19:8Now when Pilate heard this, he was more afraid than ever.
19:9He entered his headquarters again and asked Jesus, "Where are you from?" But Jesus gave him no answer.
19:10Pilate therefore said to him, "Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and power to crucify you?"
19:11Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin."
19:12From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, "If you release this man, you are no friend of the Caesar. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against Caesar."
19:13When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus outside and sat on the judge's bench at a place called The Stone Pavement, or in Hebrew Gabbatha.
19:14Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover, and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, "Here is your King!"
19:15They cried out, "Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!" Pilate asked them, "Shall I crucify your King?" The chief priests answered, "We have no king but Caesar."
19:16Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus,
19:17and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.
19:18There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.
19:19Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."
19:20Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.
19:21Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, "Do not write, 'The King of the Jews,' but, 'This man said, I am King of the Jews.'"
19:22Pilate answered, "What I have written I have written."
19:23When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top.
19:24So they said to one another, "Let us not tear it but cast lots for it to see who will get it." This was to fulfill what the scripture says, "They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots."
19:25And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
19:26When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son."
19:27Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother." And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
19:28After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), "I am thirsty."
19:29A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
19:30When Jesus had received the wine, he said, "It is finished." Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
19:31Since it was the day of Preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the Sabbath, especially because that Sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.
19:32Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.
19:33But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
19:34Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.
19:35(He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth, so that you also may continue to believe.)
19:36These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, "None of his bones shall be broken."
19:37And again another passage of scripture says, "They will look on the one whom they have pierced."
19:38After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission, so he came and removed his body.
19:39Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.
19:40They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
19:41Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.
19:42And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
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April 17, 2025
He Comes to Rifle Satan’s Fold
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Holy Thursday — Hebrews 2:10-15, 11:23-28
The first theologian of the church, Origen of Alexandria, preached a series of sermons on the Book of Joshua not long before he finally succumbed in 253 AD to the lingering injuries torture had inflicted upon him. In the year 250 Rome had blamed an outbreak of plague on Christians for their refusal to worship the Emperor Decius as divine. Thus Decius issued a decree for Christians to be persecuted. The governor of Caesarea gave specific orders neither to spare Origen nor to kill him but to torture him until he renounced his faith in Christ.
In a dungeon, Origen wore an iron collar, his body stretched “four spaces” on a rack for two years. They broke his body but not his faith. Origen refused to renounce Christ Jesus. After Emperor Decius died in battle in 251, Origen won his freedom, leaving his prison cell and returning to his pulpit. No stranger to the violence of the world, in Homily 15 on the Book of Joshua, Origen addresses the difficult verses in chapter eleven where the LORD apparently not only condones but commands the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites:
“And the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them, for tomorrow at this time I will give over all of the Canaanites to be slain… So Joshua and all his warriors came suddenly against them…And the Lord gave the Canaanites into the hand of Israel, who struck them and chased them as far as Great Sidon…And Joshua struck them until he left none remaining. And Joshua did to them just as the Lord said to him: he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.”
Forthwith in the sermon Origen rules out the possibility that the events so narrated literally happened in history. God did not, in fact, give the Canaanites over to genocide. Quite obviously, Origen preaches, the Book of Joshua must describe spiritual warfare not physical warfare; otherwise, it would not be the Word of God for the LORD is the Father of Jesus who declares, “My peace I give to you; my peace I leave to you.”
God is not like Decius!The LORD is not a Man of War!If the ancient church fathers teach us to look not at the letter but the spirit of a troubling scripture like Joshua 11, then how do we regard a passage like the one Jesus commemorates on the night he was handed over to a different Roman governor? “For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians,” Moses prophesies, “and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow death to enter your houses to strike you.” The Book of Exodus reports on the tenth and final plague a few verses later, “At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.”
On the night his friends betray him, Jesus sits down in obedience to this scripture. Having aspersed the blood of the lamb on the doorframe of the Upper Room, Jesus takes bread and wine and he does not say— as the script demands— “This is the body and blood of the passover.”
He says, “This is my body. This is my blood.”Does the Son mean to suggest that his blood protects us from his Father?And if so, how is God meaningfully different from Pontius Pilate?Traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews presents Moses as the chief prototype by which we may understand the salvific work played by Jesus on behalf of his brothers and sisters. Surprisingly perhaps, Paul does not highlight Moses as the giver of the law or as the deliverer of captive Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews does not point to Moses as the keeper of the LORD’s name or as the one whose face was transfigured by God’s glory. Instead Paul lifts up Moses for his seemingly mundane performance: he sprinkled the lintel and doorposts of the Israelites’ homes with blood. And his faithful performance of this instruction anticipates what the LORD does for us through the death of Jesus Christ. That is, the Epistle to the Hebrews deduces aspects of Christ’s death upon the cross on the basis of what Moses does with the LORD’s instructions regarding lamb and loaf and cup. Rather than Moses being a Christ-figure, Hebrews sees Jesus as a Moses figure. Like Moses, the sprinkling of Christ’s blood protects us in order to liberate us.
Protect us from what?
Or whom?
Notice.
When Paul praises Moses as a prototype of Christ’s work upon the cross, the apostle simultaneously advances an interpretation beyond the letter of the Book of Exodus. “By faith Moses kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood,” Hebrews proclaims, “so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.” The Destroyer— it’s an imperfective participle, meaning, “The one who destroys.” That is, destruction is what he does continually; it and nothing other is his very identity.
Who?
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless and a Power that is not God is afoot. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.
The fact frightens him.
Towards the end of the novel, Sheriff Bell once again turns to theologizing:
“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.”
“The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are,” the LORD says to Moses, “And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.” In spite of the apparent letter of the text, ancient Jewish interpreters insist the one who executes the tenth and final plague is not God. According to the testimony of the Old Testament no less than the New, demonic forces are at work in the world, ravaging the world, and attacking especially God’s people.
The LORD who heard his people’s cries in Egypt is not a Pharaoh! The one who struck down all of Egypt’s firstborn children is not the Father of Jesus Christ but the malevolent Angel of Death. Scripture refers to this particular malevolent figure, the Angel of Death, as the Satan or the Accuser, and even attributes proper names to him such as Belial and Mastemah. The latter name is a variation on the root from which Satan derives and means “Hostility.”
The Book of Jubilees is a Jewish apocalyptic text written some time after God’s people returned from exile in Babylon. Jubilees is included in the canonical scriptures of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The apostle Paul references Jubilees in his Epistle to the Galatians. And the church fathers, including Origen, often referenced it. In several places, the Book of Jubilees links the slaughter of Egypt’s firstborn children not to Israel’s God but to his enemy named Mastemah. In fact, throughout Jubilees, Mastemah, the leader of all the destroying spirits, functions as the chief spiritual opponent not only of God but also his people. It is Mastemah and his demonic horde, says Jubilees, that lure people to fashion idols and commit other heinous sins. Like Gríma Wormtongue in Tolkien's Two Towers, in Jubilees 48 it is Mastemah who beguiles Pharaoh first to oppose Moses and the Israelites and later to pursue them in order to re-enslave them. In other words, the Israelites’ captor is himself captive.
Satan hardens Pharaoh’s heart not the Father of the Son.
As Jubilees 49.2 recalls Exodus 12.23:
“For on this night— the beginning of the festival and the beginning of the joy— you were eating the passover in Egypt, when all the powers of Mastemah had been let loose to slay all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh to the first-born of the captive maid-servant in the mill, and to the cattle.”
God is not like Decius!
The sign of the blood of the Passover lamb on the lintel and the doorposts of Jewish homes prevented the servants of Mastemah from entering and destroying the their firstborn.Likewise, the blood of Jesus does not protect us from his Father.“Come, desire of nations, come. Fix in us, thy humble home. Rise, the woman's conquering seed. Bruise in us the serpent's head.”
That’s verse four of the Christmas carol, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
Baudelaire supposedly said that the “greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Perhaps he was correct; after all, what else can account for the fact the United Methodist hymnal does not trust you with the fourth verse of Charles Wesley’s carol.
“He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.”
I was preaching one Sunday morning at Trenton State Penitentiary. The scripture assigned to me that day was from the Gospel of Mark. A crowd has surrounded Jesus.
Out of this crowd, a worried father shouts, “Jesus, I brought you my son. He's possessed by a spirit that makes him unable to speak.”
“Bring him to me,” Jesus says.
And they bring the boy to Jesus.
And when the Spirit sees Jesus, Mark says, it threw the boy into convulsions.
“If you're able to do anything, have pity on us and help us,” the boy's father pleads.
“All things can be done for the one who believes,” Jesus observes.
Mark says “immediately” the father of the child cried out, “I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.”
And then Jesus rebuked the demon saying, “You, spirit, that keep this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”
Being seminary educated and a faithful listener of NPR, I took that wild, demon-busting story that day in the prison and I preached a placid, G-rated sermon about faith as a gift.
“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
I finished the sermon and was about to prepare the table for the Eucharist when one of the inmates, Malcolm, raised his hand and said, “Preacher, what was that? We deserve better!”
“I'm not sure what you mean," I said, “And I'm a Methodist. We're not used to this being a dialogue, so maybe we should just move on to communion.”
“You didn't say nothing about the devil that possessed that boy,” he said, “You didn't preach a single word about the power of Jesus to protect him from that evil spirit.”
I stammered.
"If you had the benefit of a seminary education, I said, you too would understand how stories like that, the devil and his legion, they're metaphors.”
“Metafours?” Malcolm shot back.
“Metaphors,” I nodded my head and repeated.
“Metafours?! Man, I don't know what a metafour is, but I do know you skipped right over one of the few things that gives hope to guys like us.”
“This passage gives you hope?”
“How do you think most of us ended up inside, preacher?”
“Most of us here, we were taken captive by something long before we ended up behind bars. That Jesus Christ has the power to deliver us from that, that's one of the few things that gives people like me hope— if Jesus can do that, then he might just be able to get me out of here.”
Last month, I laid in the emergency room, afraid I was about to have a stroke. My chemotherapy had skyrocketed my blood pressure and my head rung painfully with my heartbeat. Acutely aware of my mortality, I suddenly heard (felt?) a voice in the back of my head.
“You know your faith is a fraud,” it said— he said, “You are not loved. And death is simply the end. There’s nothing more. Nothing else.”
I shuddered.
But not from the pain.
From the disquiet.
If you think that voice in the back of my head was mine or that it belonged to my subconscious, then you have not yet come to trust the scriptures as the word of the living God.
Looking back on the exodus story, Paul writes to the Corinthians, “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer.”
Paul puts a capital D at the front of the word just as he does in the Letter to the Hebrews, “By faith Moses kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.”
God is not like Decius!The Devil is.Or rather, the Devil is the voice in the ear of every Pharaoh.However you might judge the Book of Jubilees, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the first Passover was about Israel’s liberation from enslavement in Egypt and deliverance— if even only for a time— from the dominion of Mastemah, who was at work in and with and under Pharaoh and his minions. And by analogizing Jesus to Moses, Paul proclaims that Christ has achieved an even greater exodus. The blood of Jesus sprinkled upon the tree functions like Moses’ aspersion of blood at the first Passover.
The blood of Jesus does not protect you from his Father, whom he invites us to address as our Father.
The blood of Jesus protects you from the Devil, whom he calls the “Prince of Lies.”
And because Christ's blood protects you from the Destroyer, it moreover frees you from the Destroyer’s chief weapon, the fear of death. Jesus lives with death behind him; therefore, you can live freed from the fear of death. “Through death,” Hebrews announces, “Jesus destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the Devil, and rescued all those who through fear of death were subject to captivity.”
The death of Jesus does not save you from his Father.
Through his death Jesus defeats the devil named Mastemah.
Or as St. John puts it as plainly as blood on a doorframe, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” Or as but another Christmas carol sings, “Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.”
I am sure such language of the devil strikes some of you as mythological.If so, I feel sorry for you.I simply do not know how anyone could read newspaper headlines or television chyrons and endure if there is not an Other at work in the world who is not God from whom the LORD Jesus Christ has and is and will deliver us.
The Oscar-wining screenplay for No Country for Old Men omits a scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and he observes:
“She told me she’d been readin St. John. The Revelations. Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.”
But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment.
He says, “I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”
We call it the Last Supper.But scripture instead presents Holy Thursday and Good Friday as a new but penultimate Passover— penultimate because Sheriff Bell is right. The Destroyer is not yet finally destroyed forever.Pharaohs abide. Decius has many descendants who wear not togas but tailored suits. And it seems we are bereft of bold witnesses like Origen of Alexandria. God’s people cry out still from more corners than Egypt. Mastemah whispers unfaith into many an ear; he just is that voice in the back of your head. And the fear or death (or the death of meaning) binds multitudes in sin and nihilism.
Dr. King was wrong. The arc of the universe does not (naturally) bend towards justice. Sheriff Bell is right. Things are bad, and not one of us can stop this train. But fear not! His blood will protect you. You can live otherwise. And not only was his blood applied to you at your baptism, it is here on the table.
Just so:
Come to it.
Come to the table.
The true and living God is so unlike the monsters that loom near his manger or hasten his cross. He is so unlike such monsters, in fact, he makes himself as mundane as a piece of bread. The Destroyer gave Pharaoh a hard heart. God dissolves on your lips. The Destroyer sent Pharaoh to pursue his slaves. The LORD digests in your bellies. Mary’s boy makes himself an object in your hands. His blood covers the lintel of your head; so that, no matter what comes, you are free.
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Holy Week Conversation on Substack Live
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April 16, 2025
Holy Week Conversations on Substack Live
As an added gift, here is a poem for Holy Week:
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
By Denise Levertov
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.
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Before He Dies, Let Us Remember: Jesus Loved Life
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Hebert McCabe was a Dominican priest, theologian, and philosopher whom I discovered just before his death in 2001. I did so through an aside in a lecture Stanley Hauerwas delivered on discipleship— I had those Hauerwas lectures on cassette tape and listened to them until they busted. In fact, the tapes were what prompted me to reach out and write to Stan for the first time.
In 1986 McCabe published a long sermon for Holy Week entitled “Holy Week: The Mystery of the Cross” for the publication from which he’d once been removed by the papal powers-that-be. McCabe’s facility in lifting up the winsomeness of the gospel is infectious. While we can lodge critique of McCabe’s understanding of Christ’s Passion. Fleming Rutledge, for instance, would point out that the framing question is the wrong one to ask. The pertinent question is not “Why did Jesus die?” but “Why was Jesus crucified?” And though McCabe ably dissembles the notion that Jesus is in some way the passive object of the Father’s wrath, the scriptures do posit that the cross is a work of the triune identities together.
Nevertheless, I think McCabe’s sermon is a needful reminder that the Son who dies on Good Friday is one who, from Christmas onward, loved life. Just as God loves being our God, Jesus loved being human.
Jesus loved living the life he had been gifted by his own triune decision. Therefore, whatever the cross negates about the human situation, we should not be lured into negating the goodness of life itself.Here is an excerpt from the second move in his sermon, “The Mystery of the Cross.”
I think the best way to begin is to ask why Christ died on the cross.
That we can give some kind of answer to this question in terms of the meaning and purpose of the life of Jesus is presupposed by the christian activity of preaching Christ crucified two thousand years after the event. For our purposes, then, we can rule out the idea that it was all a tragic misunderstanding which need never have happened “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”, said Jesus of his executioners; but even if this means that they misunderstood him, the misunderstanding was not fortuitous.
It was a misunderstanding that was in some way to be expected.
In the gospels Jesus is presented not, indeed, as seeking his death or courting it but as realizing that it was unavoidable. It is this unavoidability that we shall be looking at here, in Part Two of this “long sermon”
Later in the sermon, McCabe asks the question every believer and perhaps every nonbeliever asks at some point:
Why did Christ die?
This tries to answer the question: What had the death of Christ to do with us; why is it important to us?
One such answer which has been very influential in the past is that by his death Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world.
The idea, I'm sure you will remember, was that sin had offended God and since God is himself infinite such an offense has a kind of infinity about it. It was within the power of the human creature to offend by disobedience to God but it was not within our power to restore the balance of justice by any recompense we could pay to God. So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin.
This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment 'pays his debt to society', as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.
Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there.I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and so (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt.
It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others.
If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes.If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile…
Well, then, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No.The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human…
Jesus had no fear of being human because he saw his humanity simply as gift from him whom he called “the Father.” You might say that as he lived and gradually explored into himself, asking not just the question “Who do men say that I am?” but “Who do I say that I am?” he found nothing but the Father's love. This is what gave all the meaning to his life—the love which is the ultimate basis and meaning of the universe. However he would have put it to himself (and of this we know nothing), he saw himself as simply an expression of the love which is the Father and in which the Father delights. His whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human, an act of gratitude and appreciation of the gift of being human…
So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human.His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defenses against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.”
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April 15, 2025
Jesus Unmasks the Satanic Marriage Between Religion Inc. and Empire
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John 19.6, 15-17
From a wealthy New England family, William Congdon volunteered as an ambulance driver during World War II. He was the first American to enter the death camp at Bergen Belsen, images from which left an indelible impression on him. Inspired by the artwork he saw during his service in Europe, Congdon took up painting after the war and became one of the century’s most notable exemplars of abstract expressionism. In 1959, after a visit to Assisi, Congdon converted to Christianity and thereafter painted bleak iterations of the crucifixion as though both the cross and the concentration camp haunted him. His most famous painting, 1960’s Crucifixion No. 2, renders Jesus as the only object to view. In it, there are no soldiers mocking Jesus nor any thieves deriding him or asking his mercy. There is no purple robe or chief priests. There is no crown of thorns or weeping mother. There is no crowd jeering him to come down from his cross; for that matter, there is no cross. His body itself is the cross, stretched out in the shape of T on a sheer black backdrop. As though nailed to nothingness, he is the solitary spectacle we are meant to behold.
Congdon’s artwork is certainly arresting and surely truthful in its bleak refusal of any beauty to be found behind Christ’s passion; however, the Gospel narratives themselves do not put Christ on display as much as everyone else who contribute to handing Christ his cross to carry to Calvary.
Pontius Pilate sends a man, whom he knows to be innocent, to a brutal and dehumanizing death. “Crucify him yourselves,” Pilate tells the chief priests, "I find no guilt in him.” Nevertheless, without a second thought, Pilate condemns Jesus to a manner of execution so ghastly the word crux was verboten on the lips of polite Roman citizens.
Pilate— not Jesus— is the one the scriptures put on display.Not only is Jesus not guilty, he alone is the righteous one.
But those who know of righteousness, the chief priests, they plead for his crucifixion. Under the law, the priests already possess the authority to put him to death. In fact, they’ve attempted to stone Jesus twice. It’s not that they lack the authority to put Jesus to death. It’s that they want Jesus to die a death only Rome can execute. It’s no longer enough for them to stone Jesus. They want Jesus to be crucified. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” Thus, they want Jesus crucified because crucifixion will invalidate Jesus. They want more than the death of Christ. They want to nail Jesus’s Kingdom message into blessed oblivion.
They are the spectacle the scriptures want you to see.
When Pilate sarcastically arraigns the would-be king of this kingdom before the chief priests (“Behold, your King!”), the chief priests, those chosen from the tribe of Levi to intercede on behalf of the covenant people so that Israel would be a light to the nations, having no other god but Yahweh, exclaim, “We have no other king but Caesar.”
If Israel’s original failure in the Old Testament is the desire to have a king like the other nations, then Israel’s original sin happens here, not in the Garden but on Good Friday, when they choose the king named Caesar over the true God.
Jesus is not the one on display.
Perhaps this is why he is so poised before Pilate. In verse eleven, Jesus minimizes Pilate’s authority by suggesting the Father’s authority alone has brought Jesus before this judge.
Just as the Holy Spirit thrust Jesus before the tempter in the desert immediately following his baptism, the Father has handed him over to Pilate and the priests and brought him to the place the Gospel of John calls Gabbatha, the judgment seat.
For what purpose?
The Epistle to the Colossians claims that Christ in his passion unmasks the rulers and authorities and puts them on display in open shame.
Another question:
What is underneath the masks Jesus removes from those rulers?
A better question:
Who is the person behind their guises which Jesus unveils?
Precisely because the devil is a person without a self, an agency without substance, a being without a body— invisible, we require help to identify him.
In other words, to unmask Satan’s temptations Christ must be tempted by them.
The Father brings Jesus before Pilate and the priests to draw Satan out; so that, we might see the way in which the Tempter lures us away from the true God.
In this case, the chief lure is the satanic marriage between Religion Inc. (“We have no king but Caesar”) and Empire (“I find no guilt in him”).The Father brings the Son before Pilate and the priests, puts them on the display, so we might see how the Enemy attempts to deceive us still. The tradition’s language of Christ’s saving work being a struggle with an Opponent, for all its apparent mythological character, is literal reporting. Indeed you need not read contemporary reporting to know that religious pretense and political power remain the primary way the Prince of Lies deceives and misleads God’s people.
In his famous hymn, Martin Luther professes that “one little word shall him,” the devil. Beaten and bloodied, altogether unremarkable, about to accept a cross, Jesus is the little word who fells him. And he does here. He does so exactly by unmasking him.
Robert Jenson elaborates by writing,
“Once the devil is identified, he is too laughable to be taken seriously, but we have to know in which direction to throw the inkwell.”
In other words, Jesus is not like William Congdon’s Crucifixion No. 2. He is not a solitary spectacle stretched across the sheer black nothingness of our world. He is instead like a vial of black ink splashed against a white page so that we might see the unseen Enemy who stalks us still.
Thus, as the Lord Jesus accepts his cross, he is not the one who is on display.
It is his Adversary.
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April 14, 2025
Holy Week Conversations on Substack Live
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The Great and Final Litigation
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Here is the most recent discussion of The Crucifixion.
If you’d like to join us live tonight at 7:00 EST, HERE is the link.
Show Notes
Summary
This conversation delves into the themes of guilt, judgment, and forgiveness within a biblical context. The speakers explore the nature of judgment as a call to honesty and the role of God's love in the process of redemption. They discuss the complexities of righteousness and justice, emphasizing that true forgiveness is rooted in love rather than fear. The conversation also reflects on the parable of the Prodigal Son as a representation of grace and the transformative power of God's love.
Takeaways
Guilt is often tied to a legalistic understanding of judgment.
True forgiveness is rooted in love, not fear.
Judgment should be seen as a call to honesty.
Righteousness is a divine act, not merely a human effort.
The Prodigal Son illustrates God's grace and love.
God's love demands honesty in our relationships.
Forgiveness is the judgment of God that sees us as we are.
We are often the drivers of the truck, not the innocent child.
The power of the lie can destroy relationships.
Jesus' death is an act of love, not a transaction.
Sound Bites
"We need to be honest about it."
"We are the driver of the truck."
"Forgiveness is the judgment of God."
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April 13, 2025
"Only a Man Can Sit on an Ass"
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Holy Week begins today with Palm Sunday. Don’t forget we will be convening Holy Week conversations at noon eastern on Substack Live. If you’re a subscriber, it will kick you a link by email.
I’m under the weather and not preaching today so instead of posting my own sermon, I thought I would offer you this wonderful homily from the third century. Leave it to Origen to spin an entire proclamation on the act of untying a donkey.
This is Homily 37 on Luke 19.29-40:
When the Savior had come to Bethphage and Bethany near the Mount of Olivet, he sent two of his disciples to until the foal of an ass that had been tied, “on which no man had ever sat.”
This seems to pertain more to the deeper sense than to the simple narrative.
The ass had been bound.Where?
“Across from Bethphage and Bethany.”
Bethany means “house of obedience,” and Bethphage means “house of jaws,” that is, a priestly place. For jaw bones were given to priests, as the Law commands. So, the Savior sends the disciples to the place where obedience is, where the place given over to priests lies, to unbind the foal of an ass, on which no man had ever sat.
But, who else besides a man can sit on an ass?I wish for a moment to give an example, so that what I am going to say can be understood. It is written in Isaiah, “A vision of four-footed beasts in tribulation and straits,” and the rest, up to the point where it says, “The wealth of asps will not profit them.” Each one of us should consider what a great wealth of asps he has previously carried, what great riches of beasts, and how a rational man has never sat on our ass— not the word of Moses, nor of Isaiah, nor of Jeremiah, nor of all the rest of the prophets. Then he will see that the Word of God, and Reason, have sat upon us, when the LORD Jesus came and commanded his disciples to go and untie the “colt of an ass,” which had previously been bound, so that it could walk free. Thus, “the colt of an ass” is untied and led to Jesus. When he sent his disciples to untie it he said, “If anyone asks you why you are untying the foal, say to him, “Because the LORD has need of it.”
Many people were lords of this colt before the Savior needed it. But, after he began to be its LORD, the many ceased to be its lords, for “no one can serve God and Mammon.” When we serve wickedness, we are subjected to many passions and vices. Hence, the colt is untied, “because the LORD has need of it.” Even now, the LORD “has need” of the colt.
You are the ass. Why does the Son of God “have need” of you?What does he seek from you?He needs your salvation. He wants you to be untied from the bonds of sin.Then the disciples lay “their garments upon the ass” and have the Savior sit down. They take the Word of God and put it on the souls of their hearers. They take off their garments and “spread them out on the road.” The garments of the apostles are upon us; their good works are our adornment. The apostles want us to tread upon their garments. And, indeed, when the ass imitates the disciples’ teaching and their life, it is untied by the disciples, bears Jesus, and treads upon the apostles’ garments.
Who of us is so blessed that Jesus sits on him or her?
As long as he was on the mountain, he dwelt only with the apostles. But, when he begins to descend, a crowd could not have run to meet him. He descended, and sat upon the colt of an ass, and the whole people praised God in a harmonious voice.
The Pharisees saw this and said to the LORD, “Reprove them.” He said to them, “If they are silent, the stones will cry out.” When we speak, the stones are silent. When we are silent, the stones cry out. “For the LORD can raise up from these stones sons of Abraham.”
When shall we be silent?
When “the charity of many grows cold,” and when the prophecy that the Savior uttered is fulfilled, “Do you think that, when the Son of Man comes, he will find faith upon the earth?” We invoke the LORD’s mercy, lest we should be silent and the stones cry out. We should speak out and praise God, in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom is glory and power for ages of ages.
Amen.”
Amen indeed.
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