In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Old Testament reading from 2 Chronicles tells a very condensed version of the story of destruction of the temple by the forces of the Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and of the exile of the Jews from their home for seventy years, the “Babylonian Captivity”. This was an incredibly significant and traumatic event for the Jewish people, and a much more replete account of it can be found elsewhere in the Old Testament (2 Kings, Jeremiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, inter alia).
In today’s reading, the Chronicler tells us the SPIRITUAL reason for the destruction of Jerusalem: “King Zedekiah and all the leading priests and the people were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations; and they polluted the house of the Lord, which the Lord had hallowed in Jerusalem.”
It is important to remember that the commandments of God are given to us for our own good. God does not need our service. Our righteousness adds nothing to his greatness or his glory, and our sinfulness, our disobedience to his commandments does not harm God in any way whatsoever. He has not given revealed his will to us because he gets something from our obedience. In the book of Job, one of Job’s interlocutors (the only one, as it turns out, with any wisdom – and he was the youngest of all of them) makes this point. He says: “Look at the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds, which are higher than you. If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against [God]? And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him? If you are righteous, what do you give to him; or what does he receive from your hand? Your wickedness concerns a man like yourself, and your righteousness [only has to do with mortals]” (Job 35.5ff).
This, incidentally, sheds light on the reason we protect holy things: why, for example, it is not alright to receive communion if we are in a state of serious sin which we have not confessed – not because somehow it brings dishonor to God; but rather because it is bad for US. God forbids it not to protect himself or his glory, but because he is a consuming fire (Heb. 12.29), and unless we are willing to become like him, to be reformed in his image, then careless closeness to him will destroy us.
The broader point is that God has revealed his will to us, he has given us commandments, because he LOVES us. This has ever been the case, because he is LOVE. He always has been love, and he always will be love. He cannot NOT be love, because he cannot be other than himself. His love is the reason he brought the universe into being. He did not need it. And this is one of the most mysterious truths there is: God created us because he loved us. And the story of our relationship with him, chiefly as told by the Bible, is the story of his seeking to do us good in EVERY instance.
That should be in the back of our minds as we read today’s Old Testament lesson about the destruction of Jerusalem, about God’s judgment and his wrath toward Judah. And the Chronicler points out that God had persistently wooed his people, even after they had forsaken him and gone whoring after other gods: “The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place; but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets.” And then the Chronicler says something that we are apt to misunderstand in the light of God’s unfailing love. He says “the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, till there was no remedy. Therefore he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged; he gave them all into his hand.”
How are we to reconcile this account of God’s wrath with his unfailing love? How can he at once love us, always and unconditionally, and yet wrathfully deliver us to destruction and death? The answer is that he does not deliver us to destruction and death. Rather, when we persistently turn away from him, when we are presented with his law, which he has given us for our own good, precisely to SAVE us from destruction and death, when we go our own way and ignore his determined seduction of our souls, then we take ourselves into death and destruction. Our relationship with God comes to be characterized only by our distance from him, because WE have run away. And when we find ourselves distanced, by our own self-will, from the source of our life and sustenance, we find ourselves sliding into destruction.
God allows this to happen because he honors our freedom – because our ability freely to choose is the bedrock of our ability to love God and one another – because when love is constrained or forced it is not love at all. But if we exercise our freedom in turning away from the one who loves us and who always and only gives us life, then we find ourselves, as did the Jews in today’s OT reading, at the mercy of the forces of evil arrayed against us in the world. We find ourselves subject to those powers that seek our destruction. And we EXPERIENCE ourselves as the objects of God’s wrath, though in fact he is only honoring our freedom, the material condition of our reciprocal love for him.
But what happens when we find ourselves in such a situation, as we all have done, or will do, to one degree or another, at some point in our lives? What do we do when we find ourselves under God’s judgment? As the prophet Isaiah says, “let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, and he will have compassion, and to our God, for he will richly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55). God has the power to bring good out of evil, to bring life from death. This is the essence of our faith as Christians. When we profess our believe that Christ has died, but is now risen, we bear witness to our dogged insistence that God is ALL ABOUT bringing forth good – even, and especially, from the worst conceivable circumstances, and even from out of his wrath, because we belong to him: “you have been buried with [Jesus] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2.12). Nothing can alter that fact. The Lord said “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand” (John 10.28).
And we see this as well in the reading from 2 Chronicles. After a period of 70 years, there arose a new empire, that of Persia, which defeated and overthrew the Babylonians. The King of the Persians was named Cyrus. And, as the Chronicler says, “the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: ‘Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.’”
The Lord did something for his people that they could have never foreseen, but his ways are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our thoughts. Right in the middle of their deepest darkness, he raises up Cyrus and the Persians, who conquer and subjugate the Babylonians, and become the instruments for God to call his people back to Zion. Because of his benevolence toward God’s people, the Bible has only good things to say about Cyrus. Isaiah the prophet even calls him God’s anointed [the messiah] (Isaiah 45.1).
And in this, of course, Cyrus prefigures Jesus, God’s true anointed: another king raised up by God at a totally unexpected historical moment – Jesus, who just as significantly, emerges, if we allow him to, in our own lives, in our times of desolation, there to proclaim our kinship with him by the will of the Father. He is the one that brings us home from exile, sheds light on our darkness, and brings us out of desolation and death into his abundant and eternal life, if we will only follow him.
In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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