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The Second Sunday In Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): Mark 8:31-38; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Mark 8:31-38; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
✛
The Fullness of the Promise
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“Leave your home. Leave your family.” And he did it.
That’s what the Lord commanded a man named Abram, when he spoke to him one day, out of the blue. Not exactly mincing words, either: leave home, leave family, because for the purposes of God’s providence, Abram must be given a new beginning altogether, a new beginning that would enable a new ending, too. The childless Abram, already 75 years old, was promised more descendants then he could ever count, promised a home even better than the home he was leaving behind.
And he did it. For reasons we don’t know and can’t know, Abram did it. Left his home. Left his family. Left the gods that he had known: the gods of his household, the gods of his family, the gods of his tribe. There had to be a new beginning, to enable a new ending.
But it didn’t come right away. For many years, through migrations across the lands we now call holy, there were no children. Abram complained. God reiterated his promise: Abram would have children, and they would have children, more than he could ever count.
But they didn’t come right away. His wife Sarai, it seemed, wasn’t able to conceive. That was okay. They could have a child with Hagar instead, Sarai’s “handmaid,” an Egyptian. And then Abram’s child with Hagar could have children, and those children would have children, more than anyone could ever count. And in the fullness of time that son was born, and they called him Ishmael, and an angel promised that Ishmael’s descendants would be more than could ever be numbered.
Scripture is silent about the next thirteen years, as Ishmael grew, and perhaps the uneasy relationship between Sarai and Hagar reached a stable equilibrium. The obedient Abram had followed the Lord’s command by leaving his home, leaving his family, and believing the promise that God had made to him. Ishmael would have to be the fulfillment of that promise. That was okay. They raised him to the age of majority and, during that time, we don’t hear of any communication between Abram and the God who had chosen him.
Abram was 99 years old when we hear of God speaking again with his elect. It had been 25 years by that point since Abraham had left his home and family; 13 years since Ishmael had been born.
They had misunderstood. Ishmael was not the child of the promise. The covenant with Abram was implicitly a covenant with Abram and Sarai: many moons ago, Abram had left his own father and his mother, and “cleaved” unto his wife, and they were ever thereafter one flesh. After they were married, there was no Abram-without-Sarai, and so perhaps there could be no covenant with Abram that was not also a covenant with Sarai.
To a 99 year old man, given the new name of Abraham, and a 90 year old woman, now named Sarah, a boy named Isaac was born. Isaac would have children, and they would have children, more than they could ever count. He and his male descendants would bear on their bodies ever thereafter the mark of the covenant made with Abraham—circumcision, as the Lord commanded—a reminder that God keeps his promises.
I find it easy to sympathize with Abraham and Sarah for their pursuit of covenant fulfillment with Hagar. If there was an error on their part, it was the fact that they didn’t realize that the promise the Lord made wasn’t partial, or halfway. Abraham and Sarah were going to have descendants, the Lord said so, and that promise had not been made with caveats or qualifications. If there was an error, it was that they did not realize the full extent of God’s graciousness that would be bestowed on them, how God’s blessing was to be poured out lavishly on them. If there was an error, it was accepting half measures. It was focusing on penultimate things, being satisfied with penultimate desires.
And so when Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God instructed him about his grace, made it as clear as a baby’s cry that with God all things are possible.
I think it is that same focus on penultimate goods, a satisfaction with the partial fulfillment of promises, that we see with Peter in the Gospel of Mark. Perhaps it is Peter’s evident lack of trust in the full extent of God’s graciousness that results in Jesus giving him that acidic and painful instruction: “Satan, get thee behind me.”
Yet I find it easy to sympathize with Peter. When asked who they say Jesus is, Peter responds with conviction: “Thou art the Christ.” And yet just then Jesus “began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Peter rebuked him. Jesus is Lord, the Christ, the Savior of Israel. He feeds those who are hungry; he gives sight to those who are blind. Why ruin their potential with talk about suffering, and rejection, and being killed? Who has ever heard of any human being “ris[ing] again”? Who would believe it? Can’t we be satisfied with what we’ve got?
For this Peter is labeled “Satan,” that is, the “Tempter.” Peter is tempting Jesus that Jesus himself should be satisfied with penultimate goods, satisfied with just a partial fulfillment of the promise that God had made. Christ’s true inhabitation of the covenant would result in the ultimate fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham all those years ago, that all the nations of the world would be blessed by the adoption of Israel. The promise that the Christ would bring reconciliation between the creator and his creation, God and the world he had made, such that all of them would be blessed, such that all of them could live in peace and, even, in happiness, in a land on the other side of death, the land that is truly holy.
This reconciliation of the world is the ultimate good for which Jesus was sent by the Father. Abraham had had to make a sacrifice: leave his home, leave his family. Jesus would do the same, but more: though he was in the form of God, he became a servant as well, and, humbling himself in obedience, he accepted the death on the cross that was his sacrifice. Leaving his home, leaving his family, letting go of his very life. It would have been tempting to go only part of the way, for Jesus to be satisfied with local and temporal success, as Peter was, just as it would have tempting for Abraham and Sarah to be satisfied with partial fulfillment of the covenant.
God had something greater in mind, first for Israel, and then for the world, and he has something greater in mind for you, and for me. No halfway promises. No partial fulfillment. The ultimate good, not penultimate things. What would it profit a man if he gets all the penultimate things, and loses his soul? What penultimate things would someone give for their soul?
Lent is a time when we remind ourselves of the ultimate good that is life with God, and God’s own desire for us to have it, just as God so loved Israel that he wanted them to be his people, just as God so loved the world that he wanted us not to perish, but to have eternal life. It may not come right away. But God keeps his promises.
Yet it is also a time when we remind ourselves of what that may cost: Abraham and Sarah left their home, their family, their gods. This may be our Lenten journey, too: to leave behind what is safe, what is familiar; to leave behind the gods we have created, in order to worship and follow Abraham’s God, who is Jesus Christ, and to inhabit the promise of true blessedness, true happiness.
What this Lenten journey looks like may be different for each of us. The Name of God is simple and true and good, but the names of temptation and sin are legion, for they are many. I imagine that we all have these gods whom we have created, each one individual and personal, adoringly molded by our loving hands into just the shape we’d like them to be.
They must be rejected. More, they must be destroyed. When Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai and saw the golden calf, the idol that his people had made and were worshipping, he burnt it with fire, then stomped on it, ground it down into dust, and threw the dust in the river (Deuteronomy 9:21). There is a Lenten discipline for you. Destroy your gods, and worship your God. Don’t be satisfied with anything less.
May we be like Abraham this season, and listen to the Lord calling us to the ultimate good. So that one day it may be said of each of us: they heard God’s voice, to leave everything behind but him … and they did it.
