“A Prayer for Canada” (Psalm 72)

“He shall have dominion also from sea unto sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.” So runs the King James Version of Psalm 72:8, the psalm we have just read as our Bible passage this morning. I rather doubt that the psalmist had Canada in mind when he composed this prayer for King Solomon nearly three thousand years ago. Its connection with Canada can be traced to a Nova Scotian, George Monro Grant. A native of Stellarton, Grant became the minister at what was then St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax. Described as a “romantic evangelical”, Grant was a great admirer of the famous American evangelist of the time, Dwight L. Moody. Like Moody, Grant’s sermons “stressed the importance of personal conversion and an active engagement in the world, and were centred theologically in the mystery of the Atonement”[1], Christ’s saving death on the cross.

It was in 1872 that Grant accompanied a member of his congregation, Sandford Fleming, on a three-month, five-thousand-mile journey to Victoria. This long expedition was in preparation for the proposed railroad that was designed to link British Columbia to Canada and draw it into Confederation. The following year Grant published a travel book based on the diary he had kept. He entitled it Ocean To Ocean—a direct reference to Psalm 72:8.

Seven years later, after a journey across Canada on the newly laid railway, it would inspire another Halifax Presbyterian, Robert Murray, to pen the hymn,

From ocean unto ocean

Our land shall own thee Lord,

And, filled with true devotion,

Obey thy sovereign word.

Forty years after that, in 1921, these same words in their Latin form were proposed by Joseph Pope (a Prince Edward Islander) to be included as the motto in the newly designed Canadian coat of arms. Today I suspect that few Canadians would recognize that the phrase emblazoned across the cover of their passports is from the Bible!

Way back in my university days I had a friend who liked to say when people would quote from Scripture, “A text without a context is a pretext.” For this reason, over the next few minutes this morning I’d like us to look together at the biblical context of our nation’s motto—at the verses that surround those words, “From sea even unto sea”. As we do so, we are going to find that there are three themes that emerge, themes that I would place under the headings of peace, justice and compassion. So let’s take a look at each one in turn.

Peace

First: Peace. If you are reading from the New International Version (as I am) or almost any modern translation of the Bible, you will not find the word “peace” anywhere in the psalm. Instead you will find the word “prosperity”. It’s there in verse 3 and again in verse 7. If you were to check out some of the older versions, you would find that there the same word is rendered “peace”. Underneath them both there lies that most wonderful of Hebrew words, shalom. “Shalom”—the very word itself sounds peaceful, doesn’t it? But I think recent translators have shied away from using the word “peace” because too often “peace” just means a standoff, an absence of war, while deep-rooted hostilities may still lurk in the background. So they opted for “prosperity”.

However, the problem now is that prosperity, just as much as peace, is an equally misunderstood word—and that is thanks, not in the least, to what has become known as the “health, wealth and prosperity gospel”. That so-called gospel is the farthest thing from the good news that Jesus proclaimed. Wasn’t it Jesus who said to his disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)?

I suppose we have to leave that problem to the translators, but what does the Bible mean when it uses the word shalom—as it does in our psalm this morning? My Old Testament wordbook translates it as peace, prosperity, well-being, health, completeness, safety. One author has described it as “that full-orbed well-being of individual and society, in character and conduct, manward and Godward”[2] In fact it is all those things combined and brought together into one single, beautiful, all-embracing word.

Shalom is the picture that Zechariah gives us as he looks forward to the day when God himself will come to live and reign in the midst of his people:

This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there… The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew.” (Zechariah 8:4-5,12).

Again it is shalom that Isaiah wrote about in his poetic description of the new creation:

“Never again will there be in it
     an infant who lives but a few days,
     or an old man who does not live out his years…
No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
     or plant and others eat…
They will not labour in vain,
     nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
     they and their descendants with them…
The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
     and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
     and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,”
     says the Lord. (Isaiah 65:20-25)

It is a beautiful picture that the Bible gives us—and may it be the vision that we share for Canada: a land of peace, where people can live without fear of persecution, war, violence, discrimination or want. Certainly that has been the hope of the waves of immigrants and refugees who arrive in the hundreds of thousands every year.

Justice

However, peace cannot exist on its own. It must be accompanied by what the Bible calls justice or righteousness. So it is no coincidence that right alongside peace we meet those words half a dozen times in the first seven verses of Psalm 72. More than that, they crop up more than five hundred times over the course of the Old Testament. And why is this? Because justice is basic to any ordered society. And it is justice that makes peace possible.

Yet once again, as with “peace” and “prosperity”, those two key Bible words “justice” and “righteousness” are often skewed and misunderstood in our society today.

Many people in our day and age see justice as a matter of getting even with another person whom I perceive to have done me wrong. Yet more often than not that kind of attitude leads not to peace but to increased levels of hostility. And the public media only make this worse. They love to give us pictures of people with clenched fists and shouting so loudly you’d think their blood vessels were going to burst. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for anger. Indeed there are injustices that we would be wrong not to be angry about. But they will not be mended by getting even.

The same is true of righteousness. For many to be righteous means to regard yourself as morally better than other people—rather like the Pharisee in Jesus’ story. Do you remember that man’s prayer as he stood looking down his nose at the tax collector praying next to him in the Temple? “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get” (Luke 18:11-12). That is not righteousness. It’s self-righteousness, and there is a world of difference between the two. For righteousness is a matter not of being right, but of being in right relationships. What are Jesus two great commandments? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. That is what true righteousness is all about.

So what does the Bible mean when it uses the words “justice” and “righteousness”? As I have indicated already, the two unquestionably have to do with integrity, fairness and uprightness both in our individual lives and also more broadly across society as a whole. Yet even more they involve bringing people into right relationships with one another and not least with God.

Compassion

In recent years this has led to a movement towards what is called restorative justice, where victim and offender are brought together, and the offender is encouraged to see things from the victim’s perspective. But there is a whole other side to biblical justice and that is that it always has a special eye for the poor, the needy and the downtrodden. And this again is reflected in the psalmist’s vision. Take a look at verses 12 to 14, where he sings of the king,

He will deliver the needy who cry out,
      the afflicted who have no one to help.
He will take pity on the weak and the needy
      and save the needy from death.
He will rescue them from oppression and violence,
      for precious is their blood in his sight.

So we find that in the biblical pattern peace and prosperity cannot happen without justice and righteousness. And there is no real justice where there is not compassion for the have-nots, for the powerless, for those who live on the fringes of society. Job knew this centuries ago when he declared,  

I put on righteousness as my clothing;
     justice was my robe and my turban.
I was eyes to the blind
     and feet to the lame.
I was a father to the needy;
     I took up the case of the stranger.
I broke the fangs of the wicked
     and snatched the victims from their teeth. (Job 29:14-17)

If you take the Bible seriously, you cannot have a truly just society without it being a compassionate society. I remember a conversation I had over lunch with a friend some years ago. An election was coming up and I asked him which candidate he would be inclined to vote for. His answer, I thought, was both biblical and wise. “I would always vote,” he told me, “for the party I believe would most benefit the poor.” How often do you or I think that way when we cast our ballots? I know what I want: I want to see the candidate win who will do the most for me. But is that what God wants? Not according to Zechariah, who warns us, “This is what the Lord Almighty [says]: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other’ ” (Zechariah 7:9).

Ultimately as Christians we know that genuine peace, justice and compassion are to be found in one place and one place only—and that is the cross of Christ. It is by the cross that we are reconciled with God and one another and find real peace. It is through the cross that God’s justice has been finally enacted, as Jesus has absorbed into himself both the penalty and the power of our sin. It is from the cross that the mercy and compassion of God flow forth to redeem and transform both human lives and the whole of creation. And we plead for that day when Christ’s reign of perfect peace, justice and compassion will break forth, every time we pray, “Your kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Yet between that time and this may we labour with all the strength that the Holy Spirit gives us to make this country into a land where those qualities of peace, justice and compassion are honoured and lived, from sea all the way to sea.

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[1]     “Grant, George Monro”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/grant_george_monro_13E.html

[2]     Psalm 72, New Bible Commentary Revised, 495

“An Unexpected Fulfillment” (Isaiah 7:10-16)

King Ahaz paced nervously back and forth across the floor of his royal palace in Jerusalem, to the point where the carpet was becoming threadbare. It looked as though he was headed for the worst day of his reign, which had been disastrous from the start. With each passing year his tiny kingdom of Judah had become smaller, gnawed and chipped away by enemies on every side. Even the nation of Israel, their ancestral kith and kin, had been among the aggressors. In a single battle against Israel he had suffered the loss of 120,000 soldiers, with a further 200,000 women and children dragged away into captivity. Among those lost in battle had been his own son, the commander of the palace guard and the prime minister.

In addition there were the Arameans, centered in Damascus, once the dominant power in the region and still a force to be reckoned with—not to mention the Edomites, and also the Philistines, who had taken village after village, so that now the little nation of Judah was reduced to a fraction of what it once had been. Things had reached the point where Ahaz did not know where to turn.

Tragically, the one direction Ahaz never did turn was to the Lord. Quite the opposite: with each successive disaster he became increasingly faithless. At one point he began offering sacrifices to the gods of the Arameans. “After all,” he reasoned, “if they helped the kings of Aram, perhaps they will help me also.” Yet the situation only got worse—and even this did not turn Ahaz to the Lord. Instead, he confiscated the sacred vessels of the Temple and had them destroyed. Then he ordered the doors of the Temple itself to be locked up. At the same time he had shrines to false gods erected throughout the towns and villages that still remained to him as well as in every corner of Jerusalem, right under the shadow of the Temple.

The cause of the current crisis was that Aram and Israel, his two of his most powerful adversaries, had joined forces and put Jerusalem under siege. Up until this point the city had appeared to be unassailable. Surrounded by steep hills and a seemingly impregnable city wall, Ahab had thought himself safe. Now the specter of defeat loomed large, as it never had before. The prospect of utter ruin, of losing everything, was more than a possibility: it was virtually inevitable. In the verses just prior to the passage we have read this morning, Isaiah writes that when they heard the news of the alliance, “the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (Isaiah 7:2).

Isaiah

Enter the prophet Isaiah, who brings a challenging message of encouragement: “Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands… Thus says the Lord God: ‘It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass… If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.’ ”

As though these prophetic words were not enough, Ahaz would not believe what Isaiah said; and it is at this point that we arrive at the beginning of this morning’s Old Testament reading. As the passage opens we find the Lord giving a further word to Ahaz to confirm that what Isaiah had told him was true. Whether it was through Isaiah or by some other means we do not know, but the word was this: “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be in the depths of hell or in the heights of heaven.” Eugene Peterson in The Message renders this, “Ask anything. Be extravagant. Ask for the moon!”

Now Ahaz’ response is intriguing. On the surface it seems very pious. After all, the Bible warns us that we are not to put the Lord to the test. You may recall how some of the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus to give them a sign. His reply was curt: “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign.” Yet on the other hand God again and again graciously offers his people signs to confirm their faith in him and in his promises. Think of Gideon and the fleece, for example. Centuries later God would give a sign to shepherds in the hills outside Bethlehem that the Messiah had been born: they would find him wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.

Ahaz was so fixed in his opinion, however, that he refused to ask for a sign (“Don’t confuse me with the facts”)—and all under the guise of a false piety. Instead of turning to the Lord for help, he turned instead to an alliance with the powerful empire of Assyria. This was simply one in a series of flagrant acts of disobedience towards the Lord, which had included not only encouraging the worship of false gods throughout the nation, but even placing an altar to an Assyrian god within the Temple.

To this Isaiah gives his telling response: A young woman will give birth to a son and she will be inspired to call him Immanuel, “God is with us”. The reason for this was that Judah’s two enemies, Aram and Israel, were busy defending themselves against Assyria and the nation was enjoying a period of tranquility. However, Judah’s days of peace and prosperity were no more than a temporary respite. The time would come when Jerusalem would fall, its king and citizens forced into vassalage.

Who exactly this child was Isaiah does not reveal to us. Was he a royal prince to be born into the house of Ahaz? There are some who think so—that it may have been Hezekiah, the pious and just king who succeeded Ahaz. The Bible speaks of him in glowing terms: “He did what was right in the sight of the Lord just as his ancestor David had done. He trusted in the Lord the God of Israel; so that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah after him, or among those who were before him” (2 Kings 18:3,5).

On the other hand, some ask, may Isaiah have been prophesying about a child who was to be born into his own family? This theory also has its proponents, particularly since Isaiah describes the birth of his son in the very next chapter. Still others suggest that the young woman of verse 14 was not an individual at all but a metaphor for the whole nation of Judah. Elsewhere we find Amos speaking of “the virgin Israel” (5:2) and Isaiah himself addressing the city of Jerusalem as “virgin daughter Zion” (37:22). In the final outcome, I am not sure that I find any of these arguments convincing. My own sense is that the wisest course may be to leave the identity of Isaiah’s Immanuel shrouded in mystery.

Matthew

Now fast forward ahead nearly eight hundred years. A man named Matthew sets out to write an account of Jesus for the Jewish-Christian community of which he was a member. For some reason, as he muses about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, this passage from the prophet Isaiah keeps popping into his mind: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Immanuel.” Could it be, Matthew asks himself, that in the amazing story of Jesus’ coming into the world, here was the true fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy? It was not in the political machinations of Ahaz, who sought security through military alliances and worldly power. No, it was in a helpless child, born to a working-class couple far from their home, that was to be found the true Immanuel, God with us, God come to us in human flesh!

Again and again that had been the experience of Matthew and the other disciples—as they had first set eyes on Jesus at the bank of the Jordan and heard John cry out, “Look! The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”; as they had mended their nets on the lakeside and Jesus had come to them with the irresistible invitation, “Come, follow me”; as they had struggled to keep their little boat afloat amid a violent storm on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus had stood up and commanded, “Peace! Be still”; as they had stood breathless at the top of a mountain and seen Jesus transfigured before them in the presence of Moses and Elijah; as they looked back on a seven-mile walk with a stranger from Jerusalem to Emmaus and asked, “Did not our hearts burn within us?”… As they looked back on these and countless other incidents, they recognized that they had been in the presence of Immanuel, God with us.

Today

I do not believe it is a coincidence that Matthew concludes his gospel with these same words: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). This is the good news that the whole world longs to hear: that on this tiny speck at the edge of a galaxy which is itself only a speck in the vastness of the universe, God is with us. In a world that with each passing day seems to be spinning more and more out of control, God is with us.

Professor Mark Buchanan points to another obscure passage in the Old Testament prophets, this time in Zechariah. It pictures people coming from all over the world to Jerusalem to seek the blessing of the Lord. “In those days,” Zechariah declares, “ten men from nations of every language will take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, ‘Let us go with you…’ ” And what is their reason for behaving in such a manner? “We have heard that God is with you” (Zechariah 8:20-23).

Good News [Buchanan writes] the gospel is for all nations. It embraces and welcomes all languages—Urdu speakers and Inuit and Norwegians and remote tribes tucked in the folds of Burmese mountain jungles. It’s for the homeless under the bridges of Los Angeles, the untouchables in the streets of Calcutta, the drug addicted in sweaty apartments not far from where you live. It’s for rich people who live atop hills and poor people who live in ditches. It’s for the old man in his lonely room, and the teenage girl struggling to find her identity, the single mom wondering where the next meal’s coming from. It’s for the discouraged dentist, the confused mill-worker, the weary postman. It’s for everyone, everywhere.[1]

God with us.

This is the dream of every church [writes Buchanan again] for God’s life among us to be so obvious, so fragrant, so magnetic, so contagious, that all peoples clamor for the privilege of joining. Rather than us grabbing hold of people, people grab hold of us. Rather than us telling anyone, “God is with us,” they tell one another that.

As we celebrate Emmanuel, God-with-us, this Christmas, may Isaiah’s words be fulfilled in us once again. May they inspire us to be a community where the Lord is truly present—not only in our worship, but in our meetings and decisions, in our homes and in our relationships—and not only on Sunday or on Christmas but every day.

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[1]     http://markbuchanan.net/when-god-dwells-in-our-midst/