First Pass at This Week's Bible Lessons

[Most weeks, I present as many updates on my reflections and study of the Biblical texts on which our weekend worship celebrations will be built as I can. The purpose is to help the people of the congregation I serve as pastor, Friendship Lutheran Church of Amelia, Ohio, get ready for worship. Hopefully, it's helpful to others as well, since our Bible lesson is usually one from the weekly lectionary, variations of which are used in most of the churches of the world.]

We'll have two worship celebrations this week. On Wednesday night, we'll have our annual Thanksgiving Eve worship celebration with our friends from All Saints Lutheran Church and Lutheran Church of the Resurrection. The text for that night is Matthew 6:25-34:

[Jesus said:] 25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

The lesson for our upcoming weekend worship celebrations, when we'll commemorate Christ the King, is John 18:33-37:

33Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” 36Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 37Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

A Few Comments:
1. Thanksgiving is meant to be an integral part of the Christian life. We thank God for all His "good and perfect gifts," especially the gift of new life through Jesus Christ.

2. Jesus' words in the Matthew text highlight the difficulty that comes when we allow worry to dominate our lives. We find it hard to be thankful when we're worried about the bad things that might happen. Worry and thankfulness, both being attitudes, are almost mutually exclusive.

And yet, though there are things that happen in our lives that can be difficult or tragic, we can be thankful to God in all circumstances, if not for all circumstances. (See here.) God is still our God when the chips are down. And glorifying the God we know through Christ is still our highest priority.

3. Solomon, king of Israel at its zenith, was his country's greatest and wealthiest ruler ever. In the Matthew text, Jesus is saying that even Solomon, with all his bling, would have to take a backseat to the lilies of the field when it comes to stunning adornments. Unlike Solomon, the lilies do nothing to acquire their clothing, Jesus says. All of it is a gift from God.

There may be a double meaning to Jesus' reference to Solomon. After Solomon died, Israel split in two. Its former glory was gone. This is what happens when followers of God fall prey to living life like the Gentiles--non-Jews. Wealth and power may be impressive. But it's doomed to die. Only God and the things given life by God keep living.

4. As to the John text, this coming weekend brings us to the end of the Church Year. That always means celebration of Christ the King. This text finds Pilate, Roman governor over first century Judea, worried that Jesus may threaten Roman rule by claiming to be a king. Pilate thinks of Jesus' possible kingship in the same terms as the crowd Jesus fed in John 6. They wanted to make Him a ruler who would throw out the Romans and do their bidding. Jesus eluded their desires to make Him that sort of king. Yet Christ is the King of all creation.

5. Jesus discusses the concept of truth a lot in John's Gospel. I like how Father Walter Burghardt explains it in a sermon on another text from John:

...what sort of truth did Jesus have in mind? I harked back to my years of philosophy. Remember epistemology, the science of knowing? An idea, a statement, a judgment was true if it was conformed to reality, was in harmony with the real. If I say that George Washington was born in 1732, and it turns out that he was, then my statement is true. And that went back to common Hellenistic usage, where "truth" hovered between "reality," "the ultimately real," and "knowledge of the real."

Now is that the truth Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples, "The Spirit of truth will guide [you] along the way of all truth" ([John] 16:13)?...The best scriptural scholarship declares this not untrue, simply inadequate...[In Jewish thought] "truth" often serves as a synonym for wisdom. Proverbs, for example, commands us to "buy wisdom" (Prov 23:23). Moreover, "truth" is associated with "mystery," so that to know the truth is to know the plans of God...; truth speaks of God's plan of salvation as revealed to humans. The two ideas, wisdom and mystery, come together when Jesus declares that he is "the truth" (Jn 14:6). He is wisdom incarnate and he is the expression of God's mysterious plan of salvation (Col 1:27; Eph 3:4)

In addition to God's wisdom and the mystery of how Christ's passion works our salvation, I believe that there is a third dimension to the truth Jesus speaks about: Jesus as God in the flesh--God incarnate--is the rock hard foundation on which we can place the full weight of our whole lives. As I wrote in a post on John 8:32, just a few weeks ago:

Jesus Himself and the word about Jesus--His life, death, and resurrection which brings new life to repentant sinners who trust in Him--is the truth He's talking about. Build your life on Him and the truth about Him and you will be forever free of sin and death.

Maybe more later in the week.