Our blindness to the presence of God is normal. But it is also an obstacle to our work of building the kin-dom.
God and the fear of being abandoned
Proper 23A | Matthew 22:1-14, Exodus 32:1-14
God’s people were in the desert, wandering. Freed from slavery. Led by Moses. But really, led by God. A god who promised to be with them through it all. As a cloud by day and fire by night. Visible, reminding them: I’m here.
God’s name, which we know as I AM is present tense, of course. At least in English. It also evokes an eternal and future sense. God’s name is a promise. A better translation might be I-will-be-there-howsoever-I-will-be-there. That’s what God tells Moses: when the people ask if he knows God’s name, tell them that. God will show up; in God’s way. So they believe.
After the liberation, with the great plagues and the parting sea—all the signs of God’s might, they wander. Grumbling about being thirsty. And God providing. Grumbling about being hungry. And God providing. Then, in complete defiance of everything they’ve learned, they grumble about being thirsty again. And God provides again.
This sense of feeling abandoned while God is present with them; angry while God is protecting them; hopeless, when God has delivered time and again—it all comes to a head when Moses goes up a mountain for forty days. It plays into all of their fears. Insecurities. That God and Moses will abandon them; leaving them to die. Out here in the middle of nowhere.
This is so predictable.
They feel abandoned, so they pressure their priest to help them worship. Not God. The one who saved them. Over and over. Protected them. Fed them. Made sure they knew God’s presence. They aren’t interested in worshiping that god. No, an idol they make out of gold.
They are so afraid of this new normal that they grasp for an old normal. One that was terrible for them. One that they swore they’d never want to go back to. All the while probably blaming God saying God made me do it.
But after a couple of weeks they just got tired of waiting.
It’s almost comical.
All of the evidence says: be patient.
Their faith tradition says: be patient.
Personal experience of the divine: be patient.
Nah, let’s make a golden cow.
There is nothing more God could have done for these people. God gave them everything they needed to handle the adversity in front of them. Which really just amounts to hang out and don’t freak out.
And what is the second thing God said last week? After loving God and no other gods:
“You shall not make for yourself an idol,”
Right there. Written in stone.
They worked hard to fail this test so completely. And God is fixing to let them have it. Unleash the fury of a thousand suns on these arrogant, selfish, pathetic little sniveling worms…when Moses gets God to chill out.
“And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”
Christians have been getting that junk wrong for two thousand years. Unchanging God? Pff! Actually read your Bible!
Moses gets God to not annihilate God’s children for their utter incompetence and total insubordination. So we’d be wise to take that one to heart. We should also keep it mind when we hear Jesus tell this weird parable.
A Terrifying Father
A parable that Jesus tells the chief priests and Pharisees. This is another parable about a kingdom as they would have it. Like the parable Jesus told that they assumed was about them. The one about wicked tenants who coveted and killed. This one is about selfish guests who refuse to come to a party.
But this time, there’s something different. It isn’t only the people that are terrifying, but the father as well. The Father who, when jilted like a lover, annihilates a whole city. A father who doesn’t abide by the Law: an eye for an eye. When some of the guests commit murder, he escalates his vengeance. Murders and destroys.
The punishment this father meats out on the people is so extreme, our sympathy turns to its victims and toward fear of this monstrous cruelty.
When Jesus invites us to compare this to the kingdom of heaven, I can’t help but also compare it to this Exodus moment. These poor people without a Moses to change a vengeful God to a merciful one.
A Terrifying Parable
This parable is terrifying if we think this Father is the one Jesus calls Abba, Papa. So cruel, vengeful, foul-tempered and easily driven to madness. This groom’s father is not looking for the best day for his son: he’s fixed on how he’s treated. On His big day. The Father has made everything about Him.
It is tempting to turn this parable around and try to find the positive in it. And like all good stories, we might find such a practice rewarding.
But this, like the parables around it, strikes me as a shadow of the kin-dom, the negative reproduction of it. The one that draws us to see the opposite values.
I think these parables toward the end of this gospel invite us to contrast the kingdom of heaven with the kingdom of earth. And this vengeance and cruelty isn’t an expression of God, but the anti-God. The one God is not like.
Consider then, the second moment of cruelty. The first, is in the escalation of violence. The second is in throwing out the one who didn’t meet his expectations; who wore the wrong clothes. He is taken to Gehenna, the city of trash and destruction.
This man has said nothing, admitted to nothing, punished anyway. Not a heretic, but receives a heretic’s demise.
Jesus has already made the Pharisees see themselves as killers. What if the rebellious figure in this story is Jesus? Or perhaps we who bear the light of Christ. Falsely convicted and executed—an extreme overreaction for wearing the wrong clothes.
God will always be there
I think we take these two stories as being about what happens when we screw up. But I think they’re really about being so off track, we can’t even tell right from wrong anymore. Like when we’d destroy what we love so we don’t have to deal with it.
And what happens to us when we stand in front of the machinery of death? Well…we die.
And yet our deaths would not prove validity. They don’t justify violence or the rendering of this life’s most destructive forces as just and benevolent. It doesn’t even prove us powerless. In fact, it proves nothing.
Except perhaps the selfishness of hatred and its petty bitterness. The hollow desires of empty people and the pride that would shield their weakness. And the root foolishness and self-deception that accompanies power.
For the vengeful God of Exodus was stilled and Job’s Nineveh was spared; redeemed! And even these desert-wandering, suffering people, who tore God’s heart to pieces are yet never abandoned. That would have been a fate worse than death for them, surely. To actually fulfill their fears. For God to actually abandon them. Not seem to. The easy excuse to act up, defy, forget all of the rules. Pretend they didn’t know… When they thought God and Moses would never come back…
In Christ, we know! We know that God hasn’t abandoned us in this moment. Christ is inside us, lighting up our hearts. Filling us with love to share, inspire, show off to the world!
God is here! In us. With us. This is the work of our time, as it was for the wanderers, and those following Jesus into Jerusalem. To do this work, trusting in what we were promised. Not as passive recipients of grace but practitioners of it. Knowing that God is there. And will be there. Howsoever God will be there. No matter the crisis.