Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
If you have lived through any type of natural disaster—for example, a volcanic eruption with fiery lava raining down on you as you flee, or a serious earthquake, or a tsunami with a 30 foot wave coming toward you or a war—apocalyptic writing must have a special meaning for you. When your body gives out or the earth shakes, it must seem as if nothing is stable. –And ultimately, nothing is stable.
Scriptural readings such as those last week can fill a person with great fear. So today’s readings are a welcome turn, as if we have awakened the morning after a storm and the sun is shining, making everything look fresh and beautiful. In last week’s readings, God is seen as a terrible avenger of all the evil mankind continues to do.
Today the prophet Jeremiah speaks harshly to the kings of Israel, whom he blames for scattering God’s people. But then He has God promising to bring them back, to gather them together, acting as a good shepherd after his flock has been frightened into flight by a pack of wolves.
Psalm 46 continues this portrait. God is a refuge, not a cause of fear. God is the place where we go when our knees are shaking and our faces pale, “even though mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam.” No earthquake can shatter this confidence because “God is in the midst of her…The Lord of hosts is with us.” What a wonderful juxtaposition of verse 8 with verse 9! God is pictured as one who “has wrought desolations in the earth,” but then the very next line makes it seem as if his “desolations” are breaking apart weapons and causing war to cease.
We can almost see the Psalm writer putting his finger to his lips and saying to us who are cowering and frantic: “Sh-h-h! Be still and know that I am God.” Or as one translation has it: “Cease striving and know that I am God.” It is a wonderful contemplative moment when you can get your mind to stop and your body to relax, and you follow your breath in and out as you grow still and let all your tasks, all your fears, and all that is happening get sucked into the stillness and peace of God.
It is almost jarring, this close to Advent, to read the Gospel passage from Luke that has Jesus on the cross talking to the man crucified next to him. Here is a thief, someone who has broken the law of God, probably not just once, and here is Jesus offering him forgiveness. It reminds me of the story of a psychiatrist who worked with a criminal on his deathbed and the man said just before dying: “Thank you for giving me life.”
Paul explicitly makes Jesus the person who fulfills God’s promise way back in Jeremiah’s time and the Psalmist’s time: He is God with us. He “rescued us from the domain of darkness” (Col. 1:13). Not only that, but he reconciled all things in himself. He didn’t meet violence with violence. He met it with forgiveness. What followed was peace and new life. And those are the gifts held out to us again and again as we read the scriptures. Cease striving, relax in his presence, carry this connection into your dealing with the world and with others, and then the earthquakes will come, but they won’t matter.
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