March 27, 2025: Jeremiah 7:23–28 Psalm 95:6–11 Luke 11:14–23
We are a stubborn people, are we not? That was God’s verdict conveyed through Jeremiah, and God was not wrong. This being Lent, let me be the first to confess my own stubbornness. There are days when I wake up and make decisions that affect other people without asking for God’s guidance. I can be rather insistent on my way or the highway. I have been known to hold grudges. I don’t know what yours might be, but if we can’t find examples of stubbornness within ourselves to confess, then it’s time for us to examine our lives a little more closely. Which is the gift of Lent. We can always examine ourselves in the light of God’s justice and God’s grace, and change for the better.
Knowing that we can change for the better is a fundamental assumption of Christian anthropology. All of us—and all aspects of us—are redeemable by the grace of God through Jesus Christ. And I want you to hold on to that thought as we consider our readings today. “This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God… truth has perished,” said the prophet Jeremiah in the 7th century BC. “Whoever is not with me is against me,” said Jesus. These are rather extreme statements that could (and often do) lend themselves to binary interpretations. Some people and some nations are good, while others are bad. Just figure out which is which and we’re done and dusted.
Except that’s not really the witness of our scriptures, and today’s readings use some words that help us better understand God’s view of our human mess. For example, the prophet spoke about lack of obedience and discipline as examples of the stubbornness of the Jewish people. Since we often use words in conjunction with certain styles of parenting, we might hear them as “obey my orders, or you will be disciplined”. But here, their meaning is more complex. The Hebrew command translated as “obey” is actually related to the command to listen or to hear. As in the great shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Biblical obedience, then, is about listening to and loving God; not about blindly following orders.
In like manner, when we hear the word discipline in the Bible, it does not mean punishment. Rather, its roots are in the word for learning, as in being a student of something or someone. The obvious New Testament case being the disciples of Jesus. Which brings me to the curious statement from today’s Gospel “whoever is not with me is against me.” There’s that binary temptation again: some are on Jesus’ side, some are not. But here’s the ironic thing: in the 9th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is recorded as saying “Whoever is not against us is for us.” What gives?
Context always helps. And a simple read of the Luke and Mark versions reveals that Luke’s Jesus is talking about taking sides against the existential powers of evil, while Mark is talking about performing acts of kindness and healing. Caring for the vulnerable is always the work of discipleship, whether we identify as Jesus-followers or not. Recognizing and responding to existential evil requires a deeper level of awareness of God’s purposes, because evil has a nasty habit of disguising itself as good. The problem being, as Jeremiah well understood, that “people are wayward in their hearts; they do not know my ways.”
But there is a solution. It’s not a shortcut, because obedience requires patient listening. But we can, day after day, we can—by the grace of God—let go of our stubbornness. We can learn from our tradition and scriptures. We can practice the holy habits of the Shema, loving the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our might. We can practice obedience through listening with love.
As we gather to share bread in obedience to Jesus, let us heed the words of the psalmist, which are both a teaching and a promise. “Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, and kneel before the LORD our Maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.”
