What do we know about sheep?…  What do they eat? 

Why do people keep sheep? What do we get out of it? … 

(wool, meat, milk/cheese…) 

(can live in places where it’s hard to grow crops; can move around) 

Do people usually have one sheep, or a lot of sheep? … 

(usually keep a flock of sheep; they’re social and like to be in a group) 

What does a shepherd do? 

(Follow a flock around, keep them safe) 

What kinds of things could be dangerous for sheep? 

(Predators, thieves, rough terrain, bad weather, getting lost, …) 

… Do you remember that Jesus tells a story about a shepherd who has a lost sheep, and goes out into the wilderness and looks and looks until she finds it and brings it home? 

The Psalm mentioned some of the tools that shepherds use: a rod and a staff. 

I’ve known this psalm for forty-some years and I always just sort of vaguely thought the rod and the staff were the same thing and the psalm was just being repetitive (like with the two donkeys). 

But I did a little research this year and it turns out that in the part of the world the Bible comes from, shepherds might carry two things. 

The rod would look a little like a wooden baseball bat, but shorter. It’s more of a weapon than a tool. You use that if you need to whack a wolf on the head. 

People could learn to throw them really well, too, to drive a predator away. 

Who remembers the story about David and Goliath from Drama Camp a couple of years ago? … 

In that story, David, who later becomes a king, was still a teenager. He had big brothers who were soldiers, but he was a shepherd. He was taking care of his father’s sheep, while his brothers went off to fight their people’s enemies.

The enemies had a warrior named Goliath, who was a GIANT man. Everybody was too afraid to attack him.

David came to visit his brothers and bring them food, and he saw Goliath, and he said: I’ve killed lions and bears, to protect my sheep. I can take this guy down. 

What did he use to do it?… 

A slingshot and some rocks!

Being a shepherd is probably pretty boring a lot of the time, and I think David spent his time on target practice!… 

Shepherds would also carry a staff – usually a tall, strong stick with a crook at the top, like this. Shepherds use the staff to guide the sheep. They can press it against their side to get them to move in a particular direction. 

I looked up some videos of shepherds using these tools. I saw a woman use her staff to move some older sheep out of the way so that a young sheep, a lamb, could reach the good food.

And the crook part is good if you need to catch a particular sheep that’s wandering off, or falling into the pond, or it needs some attention. I saw a video where a shepherd used his shepherd’s crook to catch a sheep that was limping, so he could put some medicine on its hurt foot. 

It’s a big responsibility to be a shepherd! You’re trying to keep the sheep healthy, and together, and safe from predators or thieves, and help them find good food and water. It sounds like a big job! 

I think that’s why that psalm about God being a good shepherd can be so soothing to listen to. It’s nice to think about always being protected, and led in the right way, and having what you need. 

Okay, don’t forget about sheep and shepherds, but I’m going to talk about something else for a minute.

Starting this Friday, I’m going on a sabbatical.

That’s a big, strange word – who’s heard it before?…  

A sabbatical means somebody is taking a break from their job, usually a couple of months or longer, with the purpose of rest, study, travel, or personal growth. Usually the person still gets paid for their regular job, and they come back to it at the end of the sabbatical. 

It’s most common for clergy – people like me who lead religious congregations – or people who work at universities, to get sabbaticals. But some other kinds of jobs can have them too. It’s a good idea; I wish more people had them! 

What will I be doing? I’ll take a couple of little family trips. I’ll make stuff in my studio. I’ll go for walks on the prairie. I’ll look for cool rocks. I’ll read some stuff. I’ll work in our garden. I’ll spend a little more time with my family. I might do some low-key projects around the house. Mostly, I’ll have time for things I always wish I had more time for. 

And then, on the first Sunday in July, I’ll be back here. 

IN PERSON: While I’m away, my friend Andy is going to be here on Sunday mornings most of the time. Andy was the priest at another church in town, but he retired last year. He’s kind and friendly. He likes music, and making stuff with wood, and he likes kids. I think you’re all going to get along just fine. 

When you become a priest, there’s a special church service called an ordination. I was ordained in February of 2009, at the church in New Hampshire where I was working then. We read the Gospel story where the risen Jesus tells his friend Peter: Feed my sheep. Tend my lambs.

My friend Lisa preached the sermon for that service. 

In her sermon, she told me that some people might think that being ordained makes you go from being a sheep to a shepherd. 

Like, the people of the church are the sheep, and now I’m in charge of leading them and feeding them and taking care of them, so that makes me the shepherd, right?  

Sometimes priests talk about their congregation as their flock.

And the word pastor actually means shepherd! 

And how about this staff – does this shape look familiar to anybody? … 

Bishops carry a staff this shape, to remind them of their responsibility to tend the flock. 

But! In her sermon, Lisa reminded me: I’m not the shepherd. 

Jesus tells Peter, Feed MY sheep. Tend MY lambs.

In the Psalm we read today, God is our shepherd.

In our Gospel story, Jesus is our good shepherd. 

In an ordination sermon, sometimes the preacher will give what’s called a charge. They’ll speak directly to the person who’s going to be ordained and kind of give them some marching orders. 

In her sermon, Lisa basically told me that I should always remember that I’m still a sheep.

Here’s part what Lisa told me: 

“Miranda, I know that you have a deep sense of responsibility for the welfare and well-being of others. So I want you to remember, thankfully, that the task of ministry is not yours alone.  It takes a church to be a church. And there are many other wonderful and talented tenders and feeders working with you… Always remember that all the while that you are a tender of the sheep, 

the Good Shepherd over all is Jesus.  

Don’t forget your lambhood.

Allow yourself to be tended.

Allow yourself to be fed.” 

And that’s why I’m taking this sabbatical. To allow myself to be tended, and fed, and led. Because I don’t always feel the way our meditation on Psalm 23 invited us to feel: protected, provided for, clear about the right path. When I’m tired or busy or overwhelmed, it’s harder for me to see where God is offering me nourishment. It’s harder for me to feel the Holy Spirit nudge me gently in a direction that leads towards more peace, more life. It’s harder for me to feel that even in the toughest circumstances, I am held by a Love greater than the universe. It’s harder for me to know what I and others deeply need, and moving that direction. Rest and play and just some open time without a to-do list, even for a little while, is an important part of being available to what Christ the good Shepherd offers me… offers all of us. 

So I’m taking this time to let myself rest – and let my church care for me by doing without me for a little while.So many people are helping, and so many people are being kind and supportive and understanding, and I’m so grateful. I’m grateful to be one of Jesus’ sheep with all of you. 

And while it feels like a big deal to go away, even for just a couple of months, I know I’m just leaving Jesus in charge…  Actually, Jesus is always in charge!… 

Conclude with a parish blessing. 

I really love this Gospel story – partly, I think, because there’s so much emotion in it. Often Biblical narrative is very spare – it tells you what happens, and you have to guess or imagine how people felt or reacted. But in this story, we get a sense of some of what people were feeling. Let’s talk through it.

First, we’ve got to turn the clock back to Easter Sunday. Back in Jerusalem, some of the women who followed Jesus have just discovered that Jesus’ tomb is empty. These two disciples have heard that news – but the idea that Jesus has risen from the dead is beyond their imagining. Maybe they think that enemies stole his body. They, and probably many others, still assume that Jesus’s movement died with him, that that beautiful, hopeful moment is over, and that they might as well go home. 

Who are they? Luke names one of them: Cleopas. In John’s Gospel, among the women keeping watch at the cross, he names a “Mary, wife of Clopas.” Clopas and Cleopas are pretty much the same name, especially in the ancient world where spelling was not standardized. And these people are returning to a shared home in the village of Emmaus. It seems very natural to conclude that these two disciples are Mary and Cleopas, a couple, who had been part of Jesus’ extended group of followers. I don’t know why Luke, who often takes some care to include women in his narrative, doesn’t make that more clear; possibly it seemed obvious to him? 

So Mary and Cleopas are going home. But even though they think everything is over, they’re not over it. They’re still talking with each other about all these things that have happened. Talking AND discussing – txzhe second Greek word there has a connotation of investigating, seeking, examining. They’re trying to make sense of it all. As you would be! 

And as they’re walking and talking, this friendly stranger starts walking with them. He asks, What are you talking about? 

Actually, I am NOT a Greek expert, but it looks to me like Jesus says, “What are the words that you’re tossing at each other?” Which is amusingly sassy, under the circumstances! I may be overreading this but it kind of makes me feel like Jesus is just bursting with delight at the surprise he has for them.

They don’t recognize him, of course. That happens a lot with the risen Jesus – his friends, even the closest, don’t recognize him at first, but then there’s a moment at which they are suddenly completely sure it’s really him. It makes an odd kind of sense to me; it can be hard to recognize even someone you know well out of context, when you’re not expecting to see them, and there’s definitely a hint that the risen Christ could choose not to be recognized – as seems to be the case here. 

They stood still, looking sad. The friendly stranger’s playful question stops them in their tracks. The prospect of telling someone what has happened is so heavy that they have to pause and gather themselves. Then Clopas is a little sassy back: “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about everything that’s been happening??” Have you been living under a rock, buddy?… 

The friendly stranger says “What things?!” And so they start to explain: There was this guy Jesus, who was a prophet mighty in word and deed, and they killed him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. That phrasing is just so poignant – naming a hope, a great big hope, that they used to have. A hope that’s lost, now. Dashed.

But then – they tell the friendly stranger – things got weird. Some of the women from our group went to the tomb this morning and found it empty. They said they saw angels who told them that Jesus is alive. Some of us went to look, but we didn’t see any angels or Jesus either. So we really don’t know what to think. We’re going home, because what else is there to do; but we’re still talking about it, because there’s a lot to talk about. 

Then the friendly stranger says, You guys! Come on! Don’t you remember that the prophets said the Messiah must suffer and die? … And he starts to teach them about all the ways Jesus’ life and death echoed themes and prophecies in Jewish Scripture. 

After hours of walking and talking they’re approaching the village, Emmaus. The stranger is going to walk on, but Mary and Clopas ask him to stay with them. They invite him in – I wonder whether they had other family keeping the home fires burning, or whether the house was closed up, dusty, with almost no food, because they’d been on the road with Jesus? … Somehow they beg and borrow enough food to put a meal on the table; hospitality is a high value in that part of the world. They sit down to eat together. The friendly stranger takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it to them – and something about those actions turns a key in a lock and suddenly, suddenly, he’s not a stranger any more at all, but their friend, their rabbi, their Lord. He vanishes… and they are left saying to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us?” I love that: We knew. We knew even when we didn’t know yet. All through that long walk, that long talk: something special was happening. Something incredible. We knew.

And even though it’s got to be dark by now and the roads are dangerous at night, that same hour they get up and rush back to Jerusalem. This is news that can’t wait till morning. And they find the rest of the disciples gathered and talking excitedly about the fact that Simon Peter has seen the risen Jesus. Now they have a story to share as well. Imagine the energy in that room – the excitement, the struggle between skepticism and longing, the eager curiosity. It can’t be true – but what if it is? What if it is? 

Sometimes when we read a piece of Scripture together, in Compline or at the beginning of a meeting, we ask the question: Where does this Scripture text connect with your life? 

The connection I feel with this Gospel passage today is not with the particular events, but with the emotions in the story: grief, tenderness, excitement. 

Eleven days from today, on May 1, I start a two-month sabbatical,  a time away from St. Dunstan’s. 

Last week I was away on retreat with my clergy renewal cohort at Holy Wisdom Monastery for a few days – a good time to listen to myself and to God, and to feel my feelings. One of the things I felt was a big wave of sadness: I’m going to my church. A lot. This isn’t just the church where I’m the pastor; it’s my church. 

But on the same retreat I spent some time with my plans for my sabbatical time, and felt some excitement and joy about having the time to follow through on some ideas and intentions. 

For my first sabbatical, eight years ago in 2018, I had a big grant and a big project – exploring all-ages worship – that was explicitly something to bring back to St. Dunstan’s afterwards. This time there’s no big project. Or maybe the big project is: Rest. Be away. Do some of the things that I’d like to do, and never have time to do, in my life as a full-time pastor.

Sounds great for me! What’s in it for you? Well, I think you’ll hear some things from the people who’ll be leading and preaching in my absence that you wouldn’t have heard from me. So that’s an enrichment for you. 

My intention is to come back rested and renewed. I hope that will be a good thing for everybody! 

It’s also good for me and for the parish as a system to figure out the things I am doing – especially the things that are not intrinsic to my role as priest or rector – and experiment with handing them off to other people, or having them happen in other ways, or in some cases not happen for a while. When I return I may pick some of those things back up, or we may handle them more collaboratively going forward. Maybe some things will settle out as happening in other ways, or not being that important. 

It’s a good opportunity for us all to figure out what I do, and have the chance to notice and reflect on whether those are the things the parish wants and needs me to be doing. 

That’s good and important work for us to stay healthy and sustainable together, in what’s becoming quite a long pastorate.

The hardest part of this time away is also the most important part: stepping out of these relationships for a while.

In our Maundy Thursday Zoom service we read and discussed a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, that described Jesus as preparing to leave “those to whom he most belonged.” 

Let me stress: I am not Jesus and this is not a Jesus situation! 

But that phrase really caught my attention – caught my feelings – that evening, and came back to me as I was working on this sermon. Apart from my family, you are the people to whom I most belong. And I love you. In fact, I often think of my vocation as your priest, in terms of loving you with God’s love. 

And I can’t help worrying about the gaps I may leave. 

That person who often feels isolated or lonely – will they find other connection points? 

That person who’s told only me about some quiet struggle – will they just carry it alone for two months? 

The person who trusts me enough to ask if they need a little financial help this month – will they feel comfortable asking someone else? 

The new person who’s just had a couple of tentative half-conversations with me – will somebody else pick up that thread? 

The elder with fragile health – will somebody else notice and check in if they miss Zoom church for a couple of weeks? 

At the same time: I am often painfully aware of my limitations, that I’m just not able to visit folks as often as I feel like I should, or spend time regularly in one on one conversation with everyone who’d like that kind of time with me. I don’t notice or track all the needs or struggles, as much as I’d like to. 

And people here do a pretty good job looking out for each other. One of the things that gives me the greatest joy in my ministry is seeing people be church for each other, totally independent of me. Extending friendship and kindness and support in all kinds of ways. It’s such a beautiful thing – those moments when I see us loving one another deeply from the heart, in the words of First Peter. 

First Peter is an epistle – a letter of the early church – with which I’ve never spent a lot of time. It seems like it probably wasn’t actually written by the apostle Peter, though smart people can see that in different ways. It’s a teaching letter, probably from the late first century, that circles around questions of baptism, Christian identity, and Christian community. 

In the first chapter, the author lays out the metaphor of baptism as birth into a new family. In verses 3 and 4, in the reading assigned for last week, this author writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” 

New birth, and a new inheritance – a gift or treasure that comes to you because you are part of a family. A few verses later, the text reminds the readers to be obedient children, leaving behind their old ways and living into holiness. And today’s reading ends with a slightly awkward but pertinent metaphor about conception: You have been given new birth—not from the type of seed that decays but from seed that doesn’t. This seed is God’s life-giving and enduring word.

We’re part of a new family – and just like every family has its habits and values, we’re called to live in particular ways as members of God’s family, the church. 

This author writes, “As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your [behavior], for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” Since you call upon a Father who judges all people according to their actions without favoritism, you should conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your dwelling in a strange land.” What strange land? – 1 Peter describes the church several times as exiles, people living in a place where they don’t belong. That idea harkens back to some of the core experiences of Jewish history – enslavement in Egypt, conquest and exile in Babylon – and puts a new spin on it: Christians are strangers in a strange land because of their faith, and because of others’ hostility to their faith. In the Common English Bible translation, this author names his readers right at the beginning of the letter as “God’s chosen strangers,” which I really love! 

So: as exiles, strangers, people set apart or called out of the world to be this new family, we’re meant to live in a particular way. There are lots of things that could mean – that holy, chosen, intentional life – but this author names one thing it means right up front: “Love each other deeply and earnestly. Do this because you have been given new birth.”

Love each other deeply and earnestly. The bedrock of life as God’s family, the church: the joy and responsibility of loving one another. Not just our church friends, though I love those church friendships, but everybody who’s come seeking shelter, connection, meaning, help, belonging here. Squirmy, shy, grumpy, loud, weird or normal, young and old and new, sick or struggling, regular or very occasional, God’s chosen strangers, we owe each other love. We owe each other care. And that should’t be overwhelming because it’s something God equips us for. Something the Holy Spirit can do in and among and through and for us us, if we welcome Her. 

This text from 1 Peter blesses me right now because it reminds me that the vocation, the holy joyful duty of loving this set of people, is not unique to my role as your priest. It’s something we share, as a local branch of God’s worldwide family. In eleven days I’ll put on my email auto-responder, take Facebook off my phone, stop showing up at church, and trust you all – and the Holy Spirit – to love each other deeply and earnestly. On my behalf; on God’s behalf; and because you are each and all lovable and beloved.  

Amen. 

Our Easter Gospel today comes from the Gospel of Matthew – one of the four books of the New Testament, in the Bible, that tells us about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Over the past week, on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, we have read a big chunk of Matthew’s Gospel, leading us up to this point – Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, greeted by excited crowds; his confrontations with religious and political leaders there; his last meal with his friends; his arrest, trial, and execution. And today: what happens next.

Our Bible study group read these chapters recently – and our attention was caught by a part of the story that our readings in worship skip over. Right after his enemies make up their minds that it’s time to arrest Jesus in secret and have him killed, Jesus is sharing a meal with friends in a village just outside Jerusalem. While he’s reclining at the table, a woman comes to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she pours on his head – a gesture of honor and celebration. Matthew tells us, ‘When the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me… By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”’

There are several things going on in this brief scene. It points towards Jesus’ death and burial. There’s a hint of a possible motive for Judas, the disciple who leads Jesus’ enemies to him. In the very next verse says, ‘Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?”’

And then there’s the clash between the disciples’ ethics, and those of Jesus and the woman who anoints him. 

The disciples feel that this expensive perfume should have been sold, and the money given to the poor. That view is reasonable. It’s righteous. It’s sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

We’ve had conversations like this at St Dunstan’s, at times. Does it make sense to spend money on flowers and special treats and Easter egg prize bags when there are people struggling to make rent? What’s our budget for responding to human need? What’s our budget for joy, for holy celebration? Is there a correct ratio between those things?… 

But Jesus rejects that way of framing the question. He says, She has done a good service for me. The word good here, kalon in Greek, can be translated beautiful, right, fitting, excellent, precious. Far from being inappropriate, excessive, tasteless or senseless, he says that her action is so right that it will be remembered as part of the Gospel, the good news, as it is read and preached around the world. As indeed it is! 

The excess of this woman’s gesture isn’t waste, in Jesus’ eyes. It’s something else, something more. Something beyond sense or necessity. Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. Something more than human righteousness. 

There’s another moment in Matthew’s Gospel where righteousness falls short – way back at the beginning. Jesus’ mother, Mary, is engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, but before they are married, it’s discovered that Mary is pregnant. She says the baby was conceived not in the usual way, but by the Holy Spirit. Matthew tells us, “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly.” But before he’s taken action, an angel speaks to him in a dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph’s plan to set Mary aside was righteous. He was under no obligation to marry an unfaithful woman. Plus, maybe her pregnancy meant she had affection for another man. He would give her back to her family, perhaps give them some money to provide for her and this mystery child, and go on with his life, find another bride. Sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

But that’s not what happens. Instead, an angel speaks for God, telling Joseph: Take on Mary; take on the child. Take on shame and uncertainty. Take on mystery and possibility. Do something beyond righteousness. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

What if beyond righteousness is a theme of Matthew’s Gospel – a theme of the whole Jesus business? 

One of the Big Questions people sometimes ask is: Why did Jesus have to die? And one of the Church’s answers, over the centuries, has been: Jesus died in our place, as a perfect sacrifice, to satisfy our debt to God because of our sinfulness. The logic comes from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, developed in the earliest years of God’s covenant relationship with the Jewish people. Certain animals were to be sacrificed – ritually killed – at the holy place, the tabernacle and later the temple. Those sacrifices were a means to ask God’s forgiveness, or seek purification and restoration. From the earliest days of Christianity, this ritual system has been one among many symbols and metaphors that Christians have used, to try to make theological sense of Jesus’ death on the cross.  

But the author to the letter to the Hebrews – the place in the Bible that most thoroughly explores the analogy between Jesus and those sacrificial animals – stresses that Jesus’ death on the cross doesn’t just fulfill or perfect the sacrificial system. Jesus’ death exceeds, transcends, overflows the sacrificial system, as he serves as both High Priest and perfect Lamb. 

Understandings of the Cross that make Jesus into an animal killed to buy off God’s indignation turn the whole business into a matter of ledgers and balances – something that we feel able to understand, and perhaps control. It makes Jesus’ death on the cross sensible and necessary, correct and righteous. It’s trying to lock down the grace and mystery and excess into a transactional system that makes sense to human logic.

We see grace and mystery and excess, again, in the gospel of the Resurrection. The earth shakes! An angel tells the women what they need to know – but then Jesus shows up with the same message! The woman rush away “in fear and great joy.” The word for “fear” there is used in the New Testament for the way people feel in the face of strange, divine, confounding things: not just fear but awe, wonder, holy overwhelm. 

Why did Jesus have to die? Why was his death necessary – and likewise, his resurrection? Maybe those are the wrong questions. Maybe “necessary” isn’t the right word or concept at all; maybe the words from the story of the woman with the ointment point us in a better direction – expensive, precious, costly, extravagant. 

Maybe there’s an order of rightness, of goodness, that we’re just not equipped to understand – not because we’re stupid, but because we’re human. There’s only so much we can perceive or understand. The excess, the gratuitousness, the extravagance of Good Friday, of Easter, of all of it – maybe we have have to suspend our efforts to make sense of it all, and just open our hearts to goodness and grace and generosity beyond proportionality or reason. Senseless excess like the beauty of a blossoming tree branch against a blue sky, or the crystals that hide inside a geode, or the way you feel inside when a baby laughs, or the joyful dance your dog does when you come home. 

Maybe Jesus’ dying and rising is so much more than balancing a tally sheet of human wrongs, something instead that this unnamed woman’s act points towards and foreshadows, an outpouring of something indescribably precious and fragrant, a celebration, a consecration. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

More than human righteousness. 

Alleluia! Christ is risen. 

Why did Jonah run away? Why was he so grumpy about being sent to Nineveh, to warn the Ninevites that God wanted them to change their ways? … 

Well: Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and for a while it may have been the wealthiest city of the ancient world. Because the armies of Assyria had conquered so much territory, they could take the best of the best from all over the ancient world.

Some of our young folks may remember working with the story of Judith for Drama Camp last summer. Judith bravely helps save her town – and her country, including the holy city of Jerusalem – from invasion by the Assyrian Empire. But the Book of Judith also describes how the Assyrian army, led by their commander Holofernes, marched across a massive region, crushing any nation or tribe or city that didn’t immediately surrender. The book dedicates many chapters to that military campaign and associated destruction, but the summary from our Drama Camp script gets the idea across: “[They] looted Chaldea, and destroyed every city along the Euphrates. [They] seized the region of Japheth, and plundered the Midianites. [They] burned the fields of Damascus, destroyed their flocks, sacked their cities, and killed their young men.” And although it’s historically true that Assyria did not conquer Judea and Jerusalem, they did conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and killed or dispersed the Jewish tribes who had been living there. 

It’s not clear when the Book of Jonah was written down – and I suspect it had a long life as a story people told each other, before it became a text – but certainly the text assumes that Nineveh, and Assyria, are the enemy. They are fierce and powerful. They take whatever they want. They worship the wrong gods. They are an existential threat to the Jews, their country, their way of life and worship. 

That’s why Jonah doesn’t really want to save them! Jonah doesn’t want them to be warned, to have the chance to repent. He wants God to smite them good. 

So when God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, he runs away. And the whole rest of the book is actually much more about whether Jonah will be converted, will change his heart, than about whether the Ninevites will. 

Because honestly? The conversion of Nineveh is a snooze. When Jonah finally gets there and starts prophesying to them about how God wants them to change their ways, this utterly improbable thing happens: Nineveh repents, fully and instantly. And God does what God so often does: God has mercy. 

The story of Jonah is one of the options for the Easter Vigil because Jonah being inside the fish for three days is a little like Jesus being in the tomb for three days. But there’s a bit more to it. 

In the Gospels, some people ask Jesus for a sign. Do something remarkable and impressive! Prove to us that you’re really God in the flesh! And Jesus says, I will give you no sign but the sign of Jonah. He doesn’t explain what he means, and the Gospels understand it differently. Matthew thinks it’s the fish thing, but Luke seems to focus more on the conversion of Nineveh.  For Luke, Jesus is making a little joke: Jonah gave no prophetic sign to Nineveh, he just walked around telling them that they were on the wrong track, and lo and behold, they repented. Jesus’ answer to the calls for a sign, then, is that there will be no sign; just an invitation to change your heart and your life. 

So, Nineveh repents. Even the animals! And Jonah? Jonah is FURIOUS. 

Jonah’s mission to Nineveh reminds me of other moments in the Bible when God invites people – often somewhat reluctant people – to be part of what God is doing. In an earlier chapter of the Exodus story, God appears to Moses as a burning bush and says, “I have heard the suffering of my people; I am going to save them; I’m sending YOU.” Moses is not pleased. In the story of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, sometimes read at the Vigil, God doesn’t just command the bones to stand up and come back to life; God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and to call breath back into them. 

In the New Testament, God tells a man named Ananias to take care of Paul, who has just met Jesus on the road to Damascus and been converted to Christianity – and blinded. Ananias doesn’t want to do it much, because up until about five minutes ago, Paul was actively rounding up Christians for imprisonment and possible execution. 

God could presumably have just appeared directly to the leaders of Nineveh, or sent some of those cool angels with the flaming swords. But instead, God sends Jonah. Twice. 

God seems to want us to have a part in the holy work of proclaiming, reconciling, and redeeming. 

I love Jonah because it’s funny. It’s definitely one of the parts of the bible that’s funny on purpose, and in ways that cross the millennia. And I love Jonah because it rebukes me every time I revisit it. It asks me to reflect on to whom I extend compassion and care, where I draw the lines, and whether God would draw lines there too… 

Jonah has a tantrum about his tree. I get it! There are 100% certain trees that I care about more than certain people. And that is mine to repent of. 

The author of our Lent study book, For Such A Time As This, advises us, “Spot the signs of a person who is ready to change, and allow them to become that new person.” 

I would add: Bear in mind that sometimes that person might be you. 

Much like Jesus’ parable of the two sons – better known as the prodigal son – the book of Jonah feels unfinished. We are left to wonder how the indignant one responds – Jonah, or the faithful older brother. Perhaps, having found ourselves in the story, like it or not, we’re left to write our own ending. 

At the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday, we tend to use language of defeat, victory, triumph. Death is vanquished! 

Love wins!! 

But the Love that wins, at Easter, is a Love that extends beyond where we might want it to go, in our hearts of hearts. A Mercy that welcomes, reconciles, mends, reaches and restores…  even the people we would just as soon see God strike down. 

A Mercy that loves each of us just the way we are, but isn’t going to leave us that way.

A Love that yearns for universal redemption – that seeks repentance and transformation for Jonah and Nineveh alike. 

The Book of Jonah asks me: Am I bold enough, hopeful enough, kind enough and fierce enough, to celebrate the victory of a love like that, this Easter? 

Are you? Are we? 

In John’s Gospel, just before he dies on the cross, Jesus says, It is completed. A sense of his mission fulfilled. In Matthew’s Gospel, which we read last Sunday, Jesus cries out from the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? Meaning, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or, why have you abandoned me? It’s a quotation from Psalm 22, which we read earlier in today’s liturgy – a holy song of desperation and desolation. 

The Church’s understanding, for 2000 years and counting, is that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. How can God abandon God? 

G. K. Chesterton, an early 20th century Christian writer, has a wonderful reflection on this mystery; listen – 

“If the divinity of Christ is true, it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already. But that God could have God’s back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. 

Christianity has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. 

In that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt, and passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. 

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken by God. 

And now let the revolutionaries of the world choose a faith: they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Indeed, let the atheists themselves choose a God. They will find only one divine figure who ever gave voice to their isolation, only one religion in which Godself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” 

I love that. And this year, through our Lent reading group, I stumbled on something that took me deeper into this mystery. 

Over the past many weeks, a group of us read a book called For such a time as this: An emergency devotional, written by Hannah Reichel, who studies the German theologians who resisted the Third Reich, the Nazi regime. One figure she often mentions is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian – meaning, somebody who thinks and writes about God, and how God relates to the world and humanity, and what it means for people to belong to God. Bonhoeffer wrote about how to follow God’s ways faithfully when it’s hard, when it’s dangerous. Eventually, after deep soul-searching, he became part of a plot to try and assassinate Adolf Hitler, choosing to cause harm with the goal of ending greater harm. The plot failed, and many of the conspirators were arrested. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, and eventually executed, just days before the end of the war. He was 39 years old. 

Reichel mentions that Bonhoeffer saw discipleship – the path of following Jesus, and trying to live as he taught – as solidarity with God in God’s suffering. That caught my attention, partly because it’s so different from the way many people have been taught to think about the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross. 

The Bible uses a bunch of different metaphors to describe what’s accomplished by the crucifixion of Jesus. One of those metaphors is that Jesus is a sacrificial lamb, like the animals sacrificed in the ritual practices of the Old Testament. The idea behind the sacrificial system was that the animal was an offering to make it up to God when you’ve done something wrong, to set things right and get back in God’s good graces. Even within the Old Testament, long before Jesus, we see the prophets saying, This isn’t working! You can’t just keep doing whatever you want and then sacrificing an animal to fix it; you’re supposed to actually live in God’s ways of justice, mercy and peace!… 

But Christianity gave the sacrificial system a new lease on life, in what’s called the penal substitutionary atonement theory of Jesus’ death. 

By this theory, humanity had messed up SO BADLY that no amount of animal sacrifice could set things right. But if God punished us directly for our overwhelming sinfulness, we’d be collectively wiped off the face of the earth. So God had to send God’s only son, Jesus, to die on the cross in our place, as the ultimate sacrifice, to buy off God’s rightful anger at the human race. This understanding gained dominance in the Middle Ages and beyond – probably because making people feel ashamed and unworthy and bad is a good tool for institutional control. It’s an interpretation, not inherent in the Gospels. An angry, punitive God is not the only way to try to understand Jesus’ death on the cross. I think that’s important for us to know. 

And that’s why Bonhoeffer’s idea about human solidarity with God caught my attention. A suffering God who needs us to stand with him is very different from an angry God who wants to smite us. And it’s different, too, from what I have preached and heard others preach: that in the life of Jesus, and especially on Good Friday, God stands in solidarity with humanity in our suffering. 

So I went looking to learn a little more about what Bonhoeffer meant. I learned that the core idea here comes from a poem he wrote. Here’s part of it:  

“People go to God when they’re in need, 

Pray for help, ask for peace and for bread, 

for rescue from their sickness, guilt and death.

So do they all, all, Christians and heathens… 

People go to God when God’s in need,

find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.”

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain. When God’s in need. 

It’s a strange, surprising idea for me, but compelling. 

I learned that Bonhoeffer wrote this poem while he was in prison, awaiting execution. Things were exceptionally heavy and bleak. In letters written to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge, from the same season, Bonhoeffer laid out the idea of religious versus non-religious Christianity. Religious Christianity, as he explained it, was based on “the certain belief in a strong God, a stop-gap-God, recognised (and often greedily desired) precisely in view of his ‘all-solving’ power.” That description comes from theologian Deborah Sutera. Public theologian Tripp Fuller explains the same idea this way: “In our culture of quick fixes, technological solutions, and scientific explanations, we’ve created a “God of the gaps”—a divine problem-solver who exists primarily to intervene when human ability fails. Bonhoeffer saw this deus ex machina as religious wishful thinking, not authentic faith.”

In prison, alone, facing death, burdened by the immeasurable suffering of the world, Bonhoeffer found faith in God as divine fixer not just unsastifying or implausible, but dangerous. That God sounded too much like the Führer’s promises to be a strong leader who would solve everyone’s problems and sort out the worthy from the unworthy. (Similarly, German theologian Karl Barth wrote about his distaste for calling God “Almighty” – because Almighty is how Hitler wanted to be seen.)

Sutera writes, “Non-religious Christianity, on the contrary, lets man make the shocking discovery: his God is a [powerless] God. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian is called upon to [take on his own responsibility and agency] by letting the image of an all-powerful and resolving God collapse. It is precisely through his powerlessness that this God comes to place himself within human history and at the centre of earthly life. A fragile God, … a shattered God: yet a braver God, it seems.” Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help.”

I find this idea of God’s need, God’s powerlessness, both moving and uncomfortable. Yet isn’t it exactly what we encounter on Good Friday? God helpless on the cross. God dying. God dead. 

Someone asked me recently, What are we doing trying to follow Jesus, when this is where it leads? …  I didn’t have an easy answer. But this late work of Bonhoeffer’s might be part of one. 

It’s not that Bonhoeffer has no sense of God as active, as saving;  but he does see human response and responsibility as a crucial part of how God acts in the world. Elsewhere in his prison letters he writes, “I believe that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil. For that to happen, God needs human beings who let everything work out for the best… I believe that in every moment of distress God will give us as much strength to resist as we need. But it is not given to us in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on God alone…. I believe that God is no timeless fate but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions.” 

But though Bonhoeffer believes in a God who can bring good out of evil, it seems that in his own moments of deep distress, what was paradoxically most comforting was to know God powerless, weak, suffering – like us, with us, as us. He reflects on the similarities between Christ’s suffering and his own when he writes, “It is immensely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to suffer in the freedom of one’s own responsible deed. It is immensely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is immensely easier to suffer openly and honorably than apart and in shame. It is immensely easier to suffer through commitment of the physical self than in the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, alone, apart and in shame, in body and spirit; and since then, many Christians have so suffered with him.”

Sutera sums up Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the strange grace of encountering the powerless God: “Those who experience physical pain, psychic discomfort and their own human frailty often perceive God as powerless [or] absent… But it is precisely through this passivity and radical powerlessness that God makes himself unspeakably close to the man and woman walking in the dark night of pain…. The God with us is the God who abandons us and who in this abandonment is viscerally close: he is the God who suffers at the centre of human history… This same God, even in… complete powerlessness, can cross the darkness side by side with the man and woman immersed in the night.” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”

Meeting God in deep suffering – in shared suffering – makes faith a call into the world, not away from it. In these late writings Bonhoeffer says that it’s important to live a “profound this-worldliness” – writing, “By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.” Dwelling deeply in this world, present to both our own struggles and those of others around us – for Bonhoeffer, this is what it means to be a Christian, and a human. This is what it means to stand by God in God’s need.

The apostle Paul writes that the cross is foolishness to many – but to us who are being saved, it is the power and wisdom of God. 

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? 

God suffering. Alone. Afraid. Mocked. Abused. Dying. Dead. 

God powerless and in need. 

God abandoned by God. 

Our friend, our companion, and our hope. 

 

 

SOURCES

Deborah Sutera: 

https://unipub.uni-graz.at/download/pdf/10671501.pdf

Rudolf Von Sinner: 

https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2413-94672016000200006

Tripp Fuller: 

https://processthis.substack.com/p/standing-with-god-in-gethsemanes-7c4