Many of you have been asking about our trip through the Lands of the Bible a couple of weeks ago. It was a great trip filled with breathtaking and important sights (See photo album on the left for pics).
This is the second group I’ve taken to the Holy Land and I hope there will be many more because I really believe that there is great value in walking the land where Jesus and Paul and the other people we read about in Scripture lived and worked. To borrow a phrase I once heard, the Holy Land is a “fifth gospel”—a three dimensional reminder that these stories we’re reading are set in real places and within the stream of human history. We’re not talking fables here, nor are we speculating about some faraway fantasy land. When you put your feet on that ground, you’re walking with a new sense of understanding of God and God’s people.
Last week we talked about some of the stories of violence in the Old Testament and when we read those texts from the detached distance of history we can become very critical. How could this be? Surely, God could not be involved in this. We want a kinder, gentler vision of God. We’d rather that God give us a systematic theology than these stories of blood and guts.
But when you walk the ground, be it in Egypt, Jerusalem, or anyplace else in the world for that matter, you remember that human history is pretty messy. Cities and civilizations come and go, but the evidence of human achievement and folly are always left behind. As we walked through the ruins of several millennia of history during our trip, the one thing that kept coming back to me was a very real sense that if God was going to truly be involved with the mess of humanity, then God was going to have to get messy himself.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Bible is as full of violence, love, lust, failure, betrayal, hope, and heartache as the rest of human history. Again, we’re not talking about a fantasy world here—we’re talking about reality.
As singer Rich Mullins once put it, "The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart. It is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice. It does not so much nibble at our shoe as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from bone to bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our smaller minded questions but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask."
When you stand in the shadow of the Pyramids in Egypt, you are reminded of the cruelty of slavery and the ego of dictatorial kings. When you ride through the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel you are reminded of the thousands of people slain there over the course of centuries in hundreds of battles—battles whose names are even lost to history. When you travel anywhere in the Mediterranean you see the remains of the Roman Empire—it’s glory and might now reduced to broken columns and piles of rubble. Human history is full of mess.
But one of the things the Bible also tells us is that this God is one who’s willing to get messy and not just in a figurative, theological sense. If you’ve been reading along with us this week, you’ve been getting into the Book of Judges, which is another series of stories about the messiness of Israel’s history. They are constantly going through the cycle of being faithful for a time, then falling away from God, getting in trouble, threatened by a foreign power, then being rescued by God through the actions of a tribal leader. Even God’s people, who have witnessed God’s miraculous provision for them over and over, have a hard time being consistent and ordering their life of faith. They are tempted, conflicted, violent, fearful, frustrated and, sometimes, faithful. We learn that God works with them through it all, but we also get a sense that God is frustrated, too. God will have to take extraordinary steps to reach these people.
On this Palm Sunday, we have the opportunity to peek ahead a little bit in the story and get a glimpse of how God will ultimately deal with all this human mess. Theologically speaking, it’s about “incarnation”: God coming in person.
Phillip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, describes the incarnation beautifully:
“I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filtered the water through glass fibers and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed above the tank they dove for cover into the nearest shell. They showed me one “emotion” only: fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule, three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my designs to torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern.
To my fish I was deity. I was too large for them, my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty; my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require a form of incarnation. I would have to become a fish and “speak” to them in a language they could understand.
A human being becoming a fish is nothing compared to God becoming a baby. And yet according to the Gospels that is what happened at Bethlehem. The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play. God wrote a story, only using real characters, on the pages of real history. The Word became flesh.”
The Jesus who rides into Jerusalem is a conquering hero of another sort—a conquerer who comes not to kill, but to die. God’s Word becomes flesh in all the messiness of humanity.
On our trip went to Bethlehem and saw where it all began—where God came into the world as a helpless child, born in a cave in a small, unimportant village—a messy place.
We went to Galilee and saw where he spent most of his life as the Word become flesh, walking the shores of the lake, teaching people, laughing with friends, crying over the loss of loved ones, eating and drinking with neighbors, seeing the brutality of life under Roman rule…he experienced it all right there.
Then we went to Jerusalem…to the Mount of Olives where on that Palm Sunday long ago he looked over the city in all its grandeur—the sight of the Temple filling the foreground. We followed his ride down the Palm Sunday road, past the massive graveyard that was there even in the first century, down the steep traverse through the olive groves of Gethsemane and then up to the gates of the city. On the way down we passed the church of Dominus Flevit which is shaped like a tear drop. Here we remember that Jesus wept over Jerusalem, knowing that the messiness of human conflict and God’s judgment would come to a head in the destruction of the city by the Romans in 70AD.
We followed his steps into the city to the walls of the Temple itself and were reminded of the mess caused by the thousands of animal sacrifices brought by pilgrims day and night—the smell of blood and roasting flesh that permeating the whole city. We recall that Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers as an acted parable of judgment on the Temple. Jesus knew the mess that was coming and tried to warn them to flee the destruction.
But then, most powerfully, we walked down the streets of old Jerusalem along the route called the Via Dolorossa, where Jesus, the Word become Flesh, received the most horrible violence that humanity could conceive. Beaten within an inch of death by Roman scourges, forced to carry a heavy wooden cross, stumbling through the narrow corridors, Jesus and his mocking entourage came to that place outside the city walls where the Romans routinely executed the lowest of the lowest kind of criminals—nailing them to a cross, naked and low to the ground, letting the victims hang there until they suffocated and then leaving the bodies there to rot or be picked apart by dogs and other wild animals. The cross was a sign of Roman domination—the ultimate symbol of violence. It is here that God hangs—not as the God who fights, but the one who suffers.
It’s that picture that sticks with us 2000 years later and the picture that provides us with the flipside of those Old Testament images. The God who suffers. The God who is the victim of violence. The God who metes out his ultimate judgment on humanity not by smiting us all, but by hanging helpless on a cross—taking all that judgment on himself. It’s hard to imagine a messier, bloodier, more painful way to do it than this. But there God is…for us.
We learn from the Old Testament that God is a righteous judge who cannot tolerate sin and rebellion, but that’s only half the story. The New Testament teaches us that the righteous judge then turns around and takes the punishment of judgment on himself on behalf of all humanity. The judgment of God is ultimately borne by God himself. The violence and evil and mess of history are played out on a cross. And that cross proves to us, once and for all, how much God loves his creation…how much he loves us in spite of our sin.
I don’t know about you, but I never cease to be amazed at this story. It’s scandalous and confusing, and wonderful and life-changing all at the same time. It’s a story that couldn’t be confined to the pages of a book or to the realm of legend. It’s a story that has to be told over and over again.
It’s this story that came through the rest of the ancient world on its way to us. We followed Paul’s route through much of the Roman world—through the cities of Asia Minor—Antioch, Tarsus, Perga, Ephesus—cities of power and prestige, but places where the message of a God who suffers on behalf of humanity began to take hold in small communities of believers. We went to Athens, where Paul preached to the philosophers on Mars Hill, proclaiming to them this story of a God that was very much unlike the cruel and manipulative gods of their pantheon—gods whose statues and temples were everywhere in the city. This “unknown God” was the one true God—and we know this, said Paul, because he came and showed us in person.
The ancient world was a messy place—but no more messy than our own. But we are learning about a God who is not afraid to get involved in that mess…involved enough to die for us.
That’s the lens through which we look at the stories of the Bible and the lens through which we are called to see our own stories. We cannot know God only through the pages of a book…we must know him in person.
See, all our study of the Scriptures is designed not just so that you can know the Bible better. My prayer is that you’ll come to know the God within…a God who is righteous and benevolent, but a God who is also fiercely concerned about his people…a God who judges the world, but also a God who will take that judgment upon himself…a God who is mighty and powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent…but a God who is also a helpless baby, a humble teacher, and a broken victim of human violence—a God who will get involved in the mess of humanity…a God who can deal with the mess in your life, too.
That’s the kind of picture we need to see. That’s a God we can believe in!
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