Friendship with Jesus reframes the Christian life. To be called Jesus “friend” means shifting one’s primary focus from working for Jesus, to being with Jesus. To be Jesus friend means sharing his mind, and his heart, and to follow his simple, yet complex command to love each other! “You are my friends if you do what I command.”
Despite all the failures in this passage, there is hope for Dinah. Despite so many people around her failing there is one person in this story whose response is fitting and loving, albeit subtle and seemingly behind the scenes. God cares for Dinah in the midst of her shame and suffering, and He offers that same grace to today.
First, notice that God values Dinah’s story by telling it. Dinah doesn’t speak at all in this passage, yet her story is being told. Her heavenly Father has ensured that her story is included in his eternal word.
Of our great enemies, Sin and Death, neither is “natural.” Death entered into the world through Adam’s rebellion against God. All Adam’s lost orphaned sons and daughters are enslaved by them, conquered by them, defeated by them. Death is not natural, it is not a part of life, it is not good. It is the enemy—it is literally our mortal enemy.
Isaiah is sent by God on an impossible mission. He is to preach, without anyone taking seriously what he says. He is to preach, and to watch Israel harden her heart under his preaching. In fact, he is “to make the hearts of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes” (Isa 6.10). How long? For a month, a year, and then at last success will come? “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant,” and the people are taken into exile, “and the forsaken places are many in the land,” and Israel is like an oak tree cut down and left with nothing but a stump (vv. 11-13). True, hidden in that stump is the holy “seed,” which will grow up into the Messiah – but not for long centuries after Isaiah’s death.
Writing in the same century as Nehemiah lived, the Greek historian Thucydides penned a popular saying: “It is the people, not the walls, that make a city.” We might build upon that concept, summarizing the book of Nehemiah in this way: as God’s people rebuild the wall, God is rebuilding his covenant community under the authority of his Word. This theme is especially seen in chapter 8, which highlights how God’s people love, learn, and live his law.
God has honored David’s concern to find a place for the ark, to find a place for the location where God’s presence dwelt. For God himself has selected his own ark, his own place for his presence to dwell, and it is not in any house that David built, but in the house God built for him, his own family, his descendent, Mary. Much in the Christian tradition noticed the comparison between the description of the holy place in Exodus (Exod 40:35) and Gabriel’s language here. She is the ultimate ark, the resting place for the shekinah glory of God, which shone over her as it shone over the ark to construct her flesh into the body of God the Son.
Gratitude starts with recognizing and prioritizing grace. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is that he came and lived a thankless life. He was born, and lived, and served, and died for an ungrateful people.
I submit that this will be the most important, history shaping development of these days of unrest—not the outcome of elections, nor the length of pandemics, nor economic depressions or booms, but the success or failure of the church at living into the life Christ won for us, at being a people who lay our lives down in love for one another rather than dividing up into niche markets that mirror the divisions of the nations. If the church owns and practically enters the life that is its proper right in Christ, we might see the gospel bear fruit and multiply among the nations. That would be a development of history-altering proportions for the good.
God means for human beings to respond with thanks. When he gives a gift, it’s like he’s inviting us to dance. We’re meant to move. He’s holding up his hand for a high five and expecting that we’ll return it. In other words, his creation of food, and drink, and sunsets, and oceans, and mountains, and animals, and every other good thing, is an invitation to relationship, an invitation to response.
If our kingdom were earthly, like the kingdoms of this age, then we would always be anxious, worried that our kingdom was threatened and that our leader might be toppled. We’d be like the people who have politics as their God, who are obsessed with every little bit of news about our nation. But God’s children need not be so.
The Bible must speak to a country whose streets are filled with protesters protesting generational, personal, and systemic violence against black and brown people, or it is a dead letter. It must speak to the mothers and fathers of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—human beings, image bearers of God, whose bodies were sacrificed on the angry altar of violence and suspicion, the fruit from which humanity seems perpetually to take and eat.
While it took courage for Paul to confront Peter for this prejudice; what I think you should especially note, is the profound humility of Peter to listen. It takes great love to open one’s heart, to put down defensiveness, and to listen. Like Peter humbly listened.
This sin of racial prejudice requires special attention in America, because this was one of America’s founding sins. Our nation was built through race-based injustices, most notably—the enslavement of Africans. In God’s mercy, our nation ended race-based slavery in the 1860s. But that did not fully resolve our prejudice.
By the Spirit we are united to the Son who is One with the Father. We are not alone. God dwells in and among us. Our God isn’t far removed, Our God is right here, and so our God really actually cares about our world because our God in us is in it. That’s why the Trinity has everything to do with racism. Our God is with the perpetrators and the victims and in his mercy has promised life to us all.
Sympathy here is more than words. It is fundamentally an action – an acted out parable that makes the point with one’s whole body and one’s whole posture: sit with the sufferer. Consider that perhaps the greater the suffering the longer you sit with someone in solidarity.
We have lived all our lives in a world that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but under normal circumstances we find ways to get used to it, to tell ourselves that maybe this fallen world isn’t so bad. But we don’t know what we’re missing – we’ve forgotten the garden, and haven’t yet tasted the new heavens and the new earth. But now, this year, we know exactly what we’re missing. Could it be that this time is a time in which God is training us to wait, to yearn, to pray for his kingdom to come more fervently than we have?
This foot washing is symbolic. This passage is not just about dirty feet and Jesus’ example and becoming a person who does the jobs no one else wants to do. There’s more going on here. That’s what I want us to see this morning. So let’s look at our text together.
Jesus is the eternal Son, the second Person of the Trinity, now become and forever remaining human, while remaining fully divine. He was not a man who had a particularly powerful experience of God, or a man who came to recognize that we are all God, he’s not even a man who became divine. The current #1 selling book about Jesus on Amazon, by Richard Rohr, sets the historical Jesus against the universal Christ, defining “Christ” as “a name for . . . every ‘thing’ in the universe.”
For what do we—the church and the world—need most now? We need a vision of God! During this time of international crisis, and as the church “suffers” in our homebound exile, it is imperative that we know and believe and embrace the truth that God is on the throne.
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