Prophesying Palm Sunday

           I was listening to the book of Ezekiel.  Why? Some may ask that.

This is how I am carrying forward my Biblical devotions at the moment, listening to the Bible.  I am alternating between an Old Testament and a New Testament book as I listen.  One axiom I have in biblical interpretation is that Jesus is found on every page.  Not literally the person, but his presence, his history, his role as our Messiah, his fulfillment of what came before.

          Two things have emerged that reflect the beginning of Holy Week from the Old Testament.  The first is from Ezekiel itself.  Ezekiel was written during the Babylonian Exile.  Ezekiel’s visions look from that Exile at the reason for, the restoration from, and the continued fortunes of the people in their time of punishment. 

          Two things I remember from Ezekiel growing up (yes, I actually remember things from Old Testament prophets from my childhood).  One was that Ezekiel has UFO’s in it.  “Ezekiel saw the wheel…” was part of the introduction of a television show in the 70’s.  The other is the Valley of Dry Bones, for the literally visceral reaction that it brings out. 

          But there are other visions, some extremely harsh, and many that powerfully reinforce the misogynist history of Biblical interpretation.  But there are other moments where it speaks of Jerusalem-looking forward to their return there from the Exile.  And it speaks of the Prince, the leader of the people who will be going up to the temple, describing his route fairly precisely. 

          For me, listening to this prophecy, it connected the return from the Exile, the return to Jerusalem in triumph to Jesus’ own entry of triumph.  Although Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” has a far more ironic twist considering what then happens during Holy Week.

          Then, another detail, this time buried in 2 Kings, specifically 2 Kings 9.  Jehu is called to be king of Israel (the Northern Kingdom), to fulfill a prophecy that the evil of Ahab and Jezebel will be purged from the land.  Elisha came to Jehu, anointed him, prophesied his kingship “then he opened the door and ran.” (verse 10).  Jehu, an officer in the army, was surrounded by his fellow officers who wanted to know what Elisha (or, in their terms, ‘this maniac’) wanted.  Then, from verses 12 and 13, “Jehu said, “Here is what he told me: ‘This is what the Lord says: I anoint you king over Israel.’” They quickly took their cloaks and spread them under him on the bare steps…”

          The first reaction I had was that these passages are extremely obscure and not (to my knowledge) referenced in the Gospel accounts themselves.  So am I reading into the text?  Well, when I consider what I know of Israel at the time of Jesus, I know that they are feeling God’s punishment, this time under the Romans.  I know that this punishment is expressed as their disobedience to God, that obedience will bring their independence once again. 

          I also know that the Jews were an extremely literate people, focused on what we know as the Old Testament.  It is from their history that they find hope in the promises of God, as they have been fulfilled in the past, so they will be fulfilled again.  And these passages are about God’s restoration of power, the call to a new and faithful king, the call to be restored to their land and city.  Such language, not simply of hope but of hope fulfilled, would that not be the focus of a people who are looking for deliverance once again?

          There are patterns in the Bible, patterns of punishment and restoration, patterns of loss and renewed hope.  These patterns, as everything else in the Bible, find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus.  I wasn’t looking for connections, wasn’t searching for answers, but just listening.  It has led to some amazing revelations.

Peter Hofstra

How Does The Bible Lay Out the Work of the Holy Spirit? A Scriptural Consideration

          The Holy Spirit seems to be the most nebulous of the Three Persons of the Trinity.  It struck me as fascinating how Luke unfolds an understanding of the Spirit in his gospel.  There is a sequence in Luke chapters 3 and 4 where the Holy Spirit is considered in four distinct ways.  I believe those are distinctions that are worth exploring.  I invite you along with me, to agree or disagree with what I am seeing in the text.

          The first mention of the Spirit is in 3:21-22.  It is the baptism of Jesus.  “…Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

          This is the moment when the Spirit comes upon him.  It might be referred to as a ceremonial or a liturgical moment, because it is accompanied by the voice of God, acknowledging God’s beloved Son and giving God’s evaluation of Him.  “With you I am well pleased.”  I call it a ceremonial moment because this action marks the beginning of Jesus’ active ministry in the gospel.

          The second (a dual reference) is in 4: 1-2.  First, we recognize that the Spirit has filled Jesus, from its descent upon Him at His baptism.  But now, there is direct action in the Spirit.  “Jesus…was led by the Spirit into the wilderness…”  he was led into his confrontation with the devil, into the First Temptations of Christ.  It is not simply a ceremonial presence, but a directive presence. 

          We can argue about free will or not, but that is beside the point.  The point is that the Spirit is active with its filling our Lord Jesus with its presence.

          The third reference is in 4:14.  Jesus has completed his time of temptation and news of him spreads through Galilee on his return to the region where he grew up.  But this time, “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news…” went out from there.  This time, Jesus' actions are not tied to the direct action of the Spirit.  It is a fine point, but I believe a significant one.  Before, the Spirit led Jesus.  Now Jesus returned (from the wilderness) in the power of the Spirit.  To me, the language reads of the Spirit being an enabling presence.  The focus is not Spirit, but power of the Spirit, as Jesus 'wields' that power. 

          So Jesus has received the Spirit, been filled with the Spirit, led into the wilderness by the Spirit, and now returns filled with the power of the Spirit.  It is as if in the temptations of the devil, Jesus came into His own to use the Spirit as sent by God.

          The final mention of the Spirit is in 4:18.  In his return to Galilee, Jesus has returned to Nazareth, the town where He grew up, and He is sharing from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue on the Sabbath.  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news…”  In this moment, there is fulfillment in the Spirit.  The Spirit was prophesied to come down and come down with a purpose.  It is “to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

          To me, this connects what all the Spirit has already done, coming onto Jesus, filling Him, directing Him, empowering Him.  It is not a new thing, but a promised one.  Then he did a one-line sermon, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

          As near as I can tell, direct mention of the Spirit in connection to Jesus’ ministry disappears in this moment.  The ministry goes forward, its context in the Spirit has been established, and the proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favor goes on.  (metaphoric year, we figure Jesus ministered for about three years).

          While this is interesting for understanding the unfolding of Jesus’ ministry, it also seems to set the pattern for how the Spirit works in our own lives.  But more on that in this Sunday’s sermon.

Peter Hofstra

Missions: Who Wants to Write To My Child?

           The line that has stuck with me is “Would you want a foreign adult writing regularly to your seven-year-old daughter?”  If it was me, absolutely not, I would demand some kind of investigation.  But B. Hunter Farrell is quoting a mother whose family is being aided by US mission giving.  I guess this sticks with me because our family “sponsored” a young person, and I was the foreign adult who could write regularly to a boy in another country who was of my son’s age-when my son was in elementary school.

          This ‘In Focus’ article from the Jan. 30 issue of the Presbyterian Outlook has stuck in my theological craw.  I know I threw out the term ‘selfie mission’, and a lot can be loaded into that.  But, as with any short-cut terminology, such an expression can quickly become something to tarnish all missions, to get sarcastic with.  And this is too serious for that.

          Now, all this comes at the end of a series of posts on the kingship of Jesus.  It is my opinion that the ‘divine right’ of kings that is found in Jesus has been horribly abused by ‘royals’ throughout history, that the US rebelled against that privilege in the American Revolution, but that such privilege continues to exist-maybe without the explicit notion of ‘divine right’, but with an implicit notion of superiority from those who ‘have’.

          For me, that stands behind gender privilege, racial privilege, economic privilege, and privileges I am not even conscious of, where someone identifies as superior to someone else, consciously or unconsciously, by some abstract concept.  Poking at that presupposed privilege can get some serious pushback.

          For me, the ‘shakened’ awakening in this case came from applying that cliché, walk a mile in another person’s shoes.  Of course, to truly do that is to equalize all our notions of the other person.  In this case, putting on the mantle of the protective parent.  No way would regular correspondence from adult members of my own family from up in Canada would be welcomed.  Certainly not unmonitored.

          Now consider when that kind of unwelcome correspondence is the lever by which your family may or may not receive the financial support that it needs to function on a day-to-day basis?  And this support-with requisite communication privilege-is being done in the name of Jesus?

But, from our point of view, we are helping.  And we are getting practical feedback.  And we are (hopefully) using a vetted agency to act as our eyes and ears on the ground to make sure our mission dollars are not getting wasted.  And who is that agency going to be most responsive to?  In a perfect world, we would like to say the clients they are serving.  But this is not a perfect world, and the success of the missions depends on "our" support.  So where do the interests of the agency lie?  

We got very professionally done packets of information reporting on our sponsored child. From what I remember, done in the school that the young person was attending, so I cannot state categorically that the correspondence was being run past the parents at all.

But if that were my child, and I was accepting this foreign adult exchange of correspondence, I would want whomever that adult was to know in no uncertain terms that I, as a responsible parent, was screening everything being written to and written by my child.  But it would be a desperately difficult set of circumstances that would get me to even agree to such an arrangement in the first place.  That's what I would demand.  Why should I expect the recipient of my mission dollars to do any different?

Peter Hofstra

How Then Shall We React To The King?

           As I consider Jesus as king and our own reactions to and expectations of ‘kingship’, Jesus does no less than turn our expectations on their head.  Perhaps the most explicit moment was in John’s Gospel, where he speaks of the Last Supper.  Now, John does not actually record the Last Supper, but the lead up to it.  The disciples come in, and Jesus puts on the apparel of a servant, a slave, to wash their feet.

          This is the most menial level of service.  Peter goes so far as to refuse, but that brings about a sharp rebuke from Jesus.  Peter then swings out as far as he can in the other direction.  He practically asks for a bath.  But Jesus corrects him from that extreme as well.

          The kingship of Jesus is not ‘top-down’.  He is not at the lead of everything, defining what must happen by his own perfect nature.  Which would be entirely appropriate for him to choose to do.  The Bible is clear that at the Name of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. There IS no way to stand against the glory of Christ.

          But neither is the kingship of Jesus “grass roots”.  He is not the guy trying to build up local networks of believers and followers, being ‘of the people’ in some divine way. 

          No, the kingship of Jesus is bottom up.  Serve where the people need serving.  Jesus does not presume to define what somebody needs from him.  Nor does he seek to build a consensus of what is needed.  When he challenges people on that question, it is not for his own benefit, but to help the one coming to him to articulate that need.  So the father who comes to Jesus on behalf of his child, “Lord, help me in my unbelief.”  Or the woman who dared not speak to Jesus, but only touched his cloak, believing she would be healed-and she was.  It was not till Jesus sought her out that her story could be shared.

          How does this translate to the church?  Well, there was a fascinating article on mission work in the church in the last Presbyterian Outlook magazine that spoke to this.  Missions receive HUGE funding in the US.  But in a design that is to make the giver feel gratified, often at the expense of those being helped.  Orphanages receive huge support, but we have been systematically dismantling that system in the US and Europe for YEARS.  Why is this system ‘better’ for those we seek to help?  How about agencies that put us in touch with kids we can support.  We can write to our children.  How about the parent of one of those kids who really is not comfortable with adults in another country writing letters to their 7 year old?  That is the basis of many ‘highly successful’, perhaps we should say ‘highly lucrative’ mission industries in our country.

          This comes from a seat of privilege.  We have and we can dole out what we have, so we can define how things should work.  That is NOT how Jesus used His power.  The notion of ‘servant leadership’ sounds very nice in a book title, but translating it into real action on behalf of the church today? 

          In his article, B. Hunter Farrell uses the expression ‘selfie missions’ to describe this kind of outreach designed first for the consumption of the giver rather than tailored to the recipient of mission aid.  I am going to have to reflect on that in its own post.

          We no longer acknowledge the expression of the ‘divine right of kings’, but it looks to me like we, in the West, still feel we have some kind of divine right because of the blessings we have received and the world we have exploited to maintain those blessings.  Until we can face that, confess where it has turned us to sin, and come humbly to our Lord Jesus, how can we come into what Jesus truly embodies as our king?

Peter Hofstra

Jesus, Redeeming Kingship

           Of course, Jesus makes a very different kind of king, ultimately.  When we track what he has in common with Saul and David, there is connection, being anointed, recognized, and going off to war for the people.  But that is where Jesus differs from his predecessors.

          They spearhead armies and go into battle.  Jesus battles alone.  They are strengthened, Jesus is at his weakest, forty days without food.  Theirs was the physical battlefield.  For Jesus, it was something more.  He is forty days without food.  What is the first thing that Satan hits him with?  Make yourself food.  Attack the weak point of his physical being.  When that doesn’t work?  Attack the weak point of his emotional being.  Offer him the kingdoms of the world, appeal to his power to make the world a better place.  And Jesus resists that as well.

          But then there is the one that always baffled me.  Why would Satan tell Jesus to throw himself off the temple?  To kill himself?  Satan claims it won’t happen, that the angels will catch Jesus before he hits the ground.  So what is the devil doing? 

          Well, the prophecies are clear that the Messiah will die and return in three days.  This is something the devil knows almost as well as Jesus himself.  So it seems there is something going on here to exploit a weakness in Jesus’s spiritual being.  We know that Jesus died in agony and alone.  Here, Satan is trying to get Him to do some kind of swan dive to glory.

          Who is this king that the Spirit drove out to meet the devil?  He is hungry, he is not willing to take up the mantle of control of the world, and, as we will see, he will accept death as it comes upon him.  These are the signs of His true kingship. 

          Which runs against every stereotype and expectation of what kingship is supposed to be.  I used to think that the most prevailing sin that Jesus broke down in his ministry is the sin of hierarchy, of control.  But I see know that it is more basic than that.  Jesus is breaking down the sin of power used to exploit.  For every king and every wielder of privilege in the ‘power’ they believe comes to them from God, to truly use the example of Jesus is to surrender all of that power, to serve and not rule.

          There are two extremely powerful figures who are examples of this kind of religious surrender that carried with it tremendous political power, one for good and one, for the United States, for evil.  The first is Mahatma Gandhi, massively popular at the time of Indian independence.  His power came from his living as the people, in homespun cloth, without the trappings of the privileged British and the Indian leadership who’d sold out to these overlords.

          The second is the Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran in the late 1970’s.  His was a cult of personality, whose legacy made Iran one of the Axis of Evil and one of the continued enemies of the US and world peace to this very day.  His lifestyle was very simple, simple meals, no splendor in his living arrangements, nothing.  Now, it was in pointed contrast to the extravagance of the Shah who came before him.

          What they have in common is that they rejected the ‘rewards’, the material rewards of power in wielding the power itself, as the material was a sign they were corrupted by the power, that they were ‘in it for themselves’. 

Peter Hofstra

We Don’t Like Kings

          So there is a line that we walk as people of faith when it comes to considering Jesus as King.  On the one hand, it is the Bible that lays down this language for us.  On the other, this language has been abused by human hands.

          Anti-kingship is built into the American culture.  The colonists rebelled against mad King George and founded a nation built on freedom.  George Washington navigated our first Presidency so deliberately to prevent the trappings of ‘royalty’ from creeping in.  That is one of the best moments for me in the musical “Hamilton”; the king expresses that he did not know giving up power was even an option when Washington chose not to seek reelection.  This defied the medieval theology of the ‘divine right of kings’ that tied such authority to the authority of the Almighty.

          And we continue to work to divide the assumption that men have such power “granted” to them by God.  The expression “a man’s home is his castle” has come to epitomize that for me.  On the plus side, it is an expression that the individual has freedom against the state invading their privacy.  On the negative side, it has become the cover for misogynist abuse down to our own time.

          We may not have a king anymore, but that kind of authority is still interpreted as being in the hands of the male, that ‘divine right’ still justifies abuse and domination.

          This does not even begin to address the king-like power of wealth concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  There is this idea that the wealthy are above the law, that they buy the lawmakers to bend the law to their own wills, that they control things to their own advantage.  I think back to a story in 2018 during the California wildfires where it was reported that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired private fire fighters to protect their $60 million mansion.

          The word for such abuse is ‘privilege’. 

          So it can be hard to divide out the perfect love of Jesus who would be the perfectly just, perfectly merciful-the one who would use the kingly privilege only to the advantage of those He rules-as a faith-based ideal in the face of how such authority has become sinful exploitation that the exploiters will use religious language and misguided biblical interpretation to justify.

          It is then a very hard thing that when something wonderful in Jesus is then exploited and appropriated for human, sinful gain, when such exploitation is brought into the light of day, to go back and redeem that language once more.

          But maybe Jesus is the King precisely so that such exploitation and appropriation can be exposed, can be confessed, and redeemed in the grace of our King’s death and resurrection.

Peter Hofstra

Christ The King

          Something that the gospels have in common is the pairing of the stories of the baptism of Jesus by John, followed by Jesus being tempted by Satan out in the wilderness.  The details are expanded and contracted in different gospels.

          We see that as the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  It is fairly obvious.  But something to consider is that this is also the beginning of Jesus’ Kingship.  This is one aspect of the Messiah, that He will be of the line of King David, that He will sit on His Father’s Throne.  This has both an earthly and a heavenly quality to it. 

          I think we recognize the heavenly aspect far more quickly.  The language about heaven is that God will place Jesus at God’s right hand.  But the language is even more, that Jesus will be given the place of God as our Judge, one huge aspect of Kingship.

          This is what we interpret today.  How about the first readers of the Gospels?  Now, there is an axiom about interpreting the Bible that we can find Jesus on every page.  What has struck me is that this pairing of Jesus’ anointing and his temptation find a parallel in the Old Testament, in regards to Kingship.

          In the book of First Samuel, first Saul and then David were anointed by Samuel, at God’s command to be the kings of God’s people.  The story of David supplanting Saul is for another time, but there is a striking parallel in each of their anointings.  The most obvious is Samuel.  He is the ‘judge’s judge’, forming a bridge between the book of Judges and the regional “war leaders” to this centralized King.

          In each case, the man is identified to Samuel by God as the one to be anointed.  Each man is chosen by God.  This anointing is also a shared event.  For Saul, it was done before the gathered people, for David, it was among his brothers, in his immediate family (his public ascension to the throne would come later).  But what marked each situation is what came next.

          In each case, once anointed as king, each man went to make war.  For Saul, it was freeing the city of Jabesh.  For David, it would be going up against the Philistine champion, Goliath.  This was the pattern of leadership from the time of the judges.  Sampson, Jephthah, Gideon, all were called to fight and free the people from invaders.  So it is with Saul and David. 

          For me, having my attention drawn to the repeated patterns is what brought me to this.  While Jesus is prophesied as the king to come, for original readers of this text, for whom the Old Testament is not simply ‘more’ of the bible, but their own history, it was more plainly written.  The parallels of Jesus being baptized, anointed by the Holy Spirit, and then going into ‘battle’ against Satan I believe were not lost on those of the early church.

          Neither should they be lost on us as we seek ever more to understand more wonderfully, more completely, who our Lord Jesus Christ is to us.

Peter Hofstra