“A Field, a Faith, and a Future” (Jeremiah 32:1-15)

 I wonder if any of you have ever spent money on something and later regretted doing it. I know I have on more than one occasion. And I suspect I’m not the only one here this morning who’s guilty of it.

We call them impulse purchases. And just for fun, I thought I’d share a few examples that I came across recently on the internet:

•  I bought $50 worth of Beanie Babies because I thought they’d be worth something.

•  My partner went out to buy vegetables for dinner and came home with a kayak. He forgot the vegetables and the kayak has never been used.

•  I bought a onesie for my Great Dane. I don’t know why I bought it but I think he liked it.

•  I’ve bought a lot of “how to” kits and books, like how to knit, how to do calligraphy, how to paint, how to write poetry, etc. Have I learned how to do a single one of those things? No, I have not.

And here’s the one that I think should win the prize:

•  I bought a rare exotic cucumber from a guy who said it would give me good luck.

When we look at this morning’s passage, it might seem that Jeremiah was guilty of the same thing when he bought that field from his cousin Hanamel. Just take a moment to try to fix the scene in your mind. The city of Jerusalem was within days of total destruction. The seemingly invincible armies of the King of Babylon had rolled through the towns and villages of Israel and were now in the process of raising their siegeworks against the walls of Jerusalem. Their battering rams were pounding against the gates. The methodical, slow thump…, thump…, thump… could be heard resounding through the city, as soldiers from within vainly twanged their bows and hurled their spears in defence, and while women and children cowered in their homes in terror.

In the midst of all this, Jeremiah was himself being held under arrest for refusing to stop prophesying the ruin of Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s real problem, as Jeremiah saw it, however, was not the armies that were attacking it from without, but the moral rot that had long been causing it to decay from within. The armies of Babylon that were now pounding at Jerusalem’s gates were God’s punishment for its leaders’ and its people’s long abandonment of him and of his righteous laws.

If that weren’t enough, along comes Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel. Hanamel had not come to comfort Jeremiah or give him company. Quite the opposite, he had come to pressure Jeremiah to purchase a piece of land—a field in Jeremiah’s home town of Anathoth, just a few miles away. I can only imagine that, with the occupation of the Babylonian troops, property values in the area had taken something of a nosedive! But Hanamel hadn’t come to offer Jeremiah a deal. He was insisting that Jeremiah had an obligation to his ancestors to purchase the property. So apparently without any negotiation or haggling, Jeremiah bought the field for seventeen shekels of silver—a weight of around two hundred grams or a little less than half a pound by today’s measure.

Now I can’t tell you whether seventeen shekels of silver was a bargain for a field or not. And besides, Jeremiah never reveals its. But whatever the case, that was not what it was all about.

It wasn’t that Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel was some fast-talking huckster. Nor was it that Jeremiah was a fool for a good deal or even that he felt an obligation to his ancestors. No, Jeremiah was acting in obedience to a direct command from the Lord himself. God had told him in advance, “Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, ‘Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative and it is not only your right, it is your duty to buy it.’”

“I knew that this was the word of the Lord,” Jeremiah reflected, “so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels  of silver.”

Jeremiah’s Parables

So what was this property deal all about? What was Jeremiah doing when he knew that it was probably only a matter of a few days before Jerusalem’s walls would be breached, the city would lie in ruins, and its people? Well, I suppose you could think of it as a kind of object lesson.

Back when I was pastoring congregations, one of the features of the Sunday morning service every week was the children’s talk. It usually took the form of an object lesson, something from everyday life that the children could relate to and hopefully would stick in their minds. One of the great disappointments of my ministry, however, was the number of adults on the way out of the service who would remark on the children’s talk but would never mention the sermon that I had spent hours preparing!

Object lessons can be memorable. (Think of Jesus’ parables.) And Jeremiah was a master of them. There was the almond tree—which in Hebrew sounds very much like watching. And so Jeremiah used it as a reminder that the Lord was always watching over his people Israel (1:11-12). In alarming contrast to that, there was the boiling pot, tilting over and about to spill—a warning that God would be pouring out his judgement over his people (1:12-16).

Move along a few chapters and there is the linen belt that the Lord instructed Jeremiah to purchase and bind around his waist, only to tell him to hide it among the rocks, where it quickly began to mildew and disintegrate—a visible reminder that God had once bound his people to himself but they had turned from him and strayed (13:1-11). The parable of the belt was followed by the wine jars, which spoke of a people drunk on excess and decadent behaviour and warning that God would soon smash them in his anger (13:12-14). Proceeding to chapter 18, there was what is perhaps Jeremiah’s most memorable parable of the potter’s wheel. If the potter wasn’t satisfied with his work, it was a simple matter for him to reshape it. So it was that the Lord spoke through Jeremiah, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does? Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” (18:1-6)

And the list goes on, with the two baskets of figs, one with good figs, the other with figs that had gone rotten (24:1-10). The bad figs were a warning to King Zedekiah and his officials, who had all become corrupt, that God would banish and destroy them. The good figs stood as a word of comfort to the exiled citizens of Israel: “My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.”

Move along to the next chapter and there is the dark parable of the cup of the wine of God’s wrath, which he would force all the nations to drink—including Judah (25:15-29). And two chapters later the Lord instructs Jeremiah to make a yoke and put it over his neck (27:1-11). It was to serve as a warning that Israel and the surrounding nations would soon be made to bow their necks under the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

Now move along to our chapter this morning, and you can see how Jeremiah was able to use this incident in his life as another parable, another object lesson on the Lord’s dealings with his people. This time Jeremiah was literally putting his money where his mouth was, giving substance to his conviction that God was calling him to stay in Jerusalem.

Yes, the city was doomed to destruction. And Jeremiah could easily have said, “I’m outta here.” But God still had a purpose for him there. Jeremiah was acting out of a deep trust in God’s unfailing promise—a promise made more than a millennium in the past to Abraham:

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God. (Genesis 17:7-8)

Jeremiah’s purchase of the field, in the midst of a world that was falling apart, was a demonstration of his faith in the unchanging purposes of God. With the Babylonian armies pounding at the gates, Jeremiah was well aware that in all likelihood he would never set foot on that field. Yet rather than disengaging from the realities around him, he chose to do something that from a purely worldly perspective didn’t make any sense at all. His purchase of the field was a witness to his commitment his people and to his unshakeable belief that God, who had shown his faithfulness to them again and again in the past, would continue faithful in the years ahead.

Engagement

Flash forward now to the twentieth century. When I gave my life to Christ as a teenager, I was encouraged to start memorizing verses from the Bible. And one of the verses I remember committing to memory early in that process was 2 Corinthians 6:17, which in the old King James Version runs thus: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord…”

Around the same time I became active in a church youth group where we often sang a song that ran like this. (Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.)

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Now put these influences together, and I found that there was a constant tug on me not to get too involved in “the world” or to allow myself to be influenced by worldly thinking and attitudes. And I can’t argue that there isn’t a certain wisdom in that. We live in perilous times, when the truth is being bent and twisted and outright denied all around us, to the point where it’s hard to know whom to believe.

Looking back, however, I am grateful to God that he put other believers around me who encouraged me not to insulate myself from the world, but to be engaged in it, to wrestle with secular thinking, to have deep friendships and to work alongside people who didn’t necessarily share my Christian presuppositions. And I found that my trust in God was only deepened and strengthened as a result.

Like Jeremiah, it was vital that I seek, not to insulate myself from the world, but instead, to influence it, even if only in a small way, and to make a positive impact.

Surely that was what Jesus meant when he told his followers, “You are the salt of the earth…” “You are the light of the world…” Salt doesn’t do a lot of good when you store it in its box or in leave it in a shaker. It needs to be sprinkled out and mixed in with the food.

We use salt as a flavour enhancer and we also use it as a preservative. Right now is pickling season. It’s hard to imagine pickling without salt. It’s salt that helps to preserve the pickles, to keep them fresh. And it’s salt that gives them flavour. And that is what Jesus was challenging his disciples to do—and by extension, you and me today.

Years ago there was a popular book called Out of the Saltshaker by a woman named Rebecca Manley Pippert. One little quote from that book that stands out for me runs like this:

What do you do with a man who is supposed to be the holiest man who has ever lived and yet goes around talking with prostitutes and hugging lepers? What do you do with a man who not only mingles with the most unsavory people but actually seems to enjoy them? The religious accused him of being a drunkard, a glutton and having tacky taste in friends. It is a profound irony that the Son of God visited this planet and one of the chief complaints against him was that he was not religious enough.

Jeremiah recognized that, in spite of all the mayhem that was happening around him, in spite of the doom that was surrounding the city, God was calling him to stay. Even more, God was calling him to invest himself in it. And, as I said, I don’t know what seventeen shekels of silver was worth, but it served to signify Jeremiah’s commitment to staying put.

So as we listen to Jeremiah, let me ask you, How is God calling you to invest in your world today—in your neighbourhood? —in your workplace? —in your school? Like Jeremiah, you may never be privileged to see the fruits, but I guarantee you won’t regret it when you hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

 

“Paul’s Vision for the Church” (Ephesians 3:8-21)

Many years ago (I’m embarrassed to admit how many!) a wise friend passed on to me a little book entitled The Gospel Blimp. Maybe some of you are old enough to have heard of it. Perhaps some have even read it! The story opens with a group of friends from church gathered for a barbecue in the back yard of George and Ethel Griscom. At some point someone notices the Griscoms’ next-door neighbours, who are sitting on their porch drinking beer and playing cards. This leads into a conversation on the Griscoms’ side of the fence about how to reach people with the gospel.

In the midst of the conversation an airplane flies very low overhead—so low, in fact, that everyone on both sides of the fence stops what they are doing to look up and gaze at it—and out of that there sprouts the germ of an idea. That low-flying airplane caught everybody’s attention. How about using a blimp with a message trailing behind it to glide slowly over people’s homes to proclaim the gospel to all the unchurched citizens of the whole town?

Well, the story goes on from there. And lo and behold, the idea becomes a reality. After that it doesn’t take much longer for someone to suggest a further step. How about using the blimp to sprinkle evangelistic pamphlets over entire neighbourhoods? Soon someone else comes up with the further brainwave of installing speaker horns to broadcast sermons and Christian music. Well, as you can imagine (or perhaps you’d prefer not to!) the story goes on from there. And it doesn’t take very much longer for the whole project to collapse in disaster.

But meanwhile, quietly in the midst of all this energy being devoted to the blimp, the Griscoms’ neighbours do become Christians. Not because of the blimp, which only ever served to upset and annoy people. But because somewhere along the way George and Ethel actually began to get to know their neighbours and ended up helping them through a serious health crisis.

All of this reminds me of some advice another friend passed on to me early in my Christian walk: “Be careful not to get so caught up in the work of the Lord that you lose sight of the Lord of the work.”

So it is that Paul is writing to the believers in Ephesus to remind them of their true calling, and to help them focus on God’s intentions for his church. And I hope I’m going to make it easy for you to remember if I summarize what he says under three headings: They needed to be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power, and continuous in praise. 

Clear our Purpose (8-13)

First, then, the believers living in Ephesus were called to be clear in their purpose. Paul sets out that purpose in the opening verse of this morning’s passage. And it is this: to proclaim the boundless, unfathomable, infinite riches of Christ—a riches that beggars all human calculation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” he writes elsewhere. It’s as though, in spite of all his scholarly training and oratorical eloquence, Paul is scarcely able to find the words to express himself. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

John, at the very end of his gospel, after setting down more than twenty chapters of his memories of Jesus, finds himself coming to a similar conclusion: “Jesus did many other things as well,” he writes. “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) He just couldn’t ever say enough about Jesus.

So it is that Paul writes that his whole calling—and by extension yours and mine—is to make plain God’s eternal plan, which has now been realized in Jesus Christ. The verb that Paul uses here is photizo. Perhaps you can hear in it our English words photograph, photoelectric, photon, photosensitive, photosynthesis… They all have to do with light.

Of course, behind Paul’s words is the command that Jesus gave to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:16). So it is that you and I are called and empowered and commissioned to live lives shining with the light of Jesus—his all-embracing love, his unchanging truth, his pure goodness—in what today seems to be an ever-increasingly dark and threatening world.

And that light will shine only as our words are backed up by our actions, by the quality of our lives. It is our lives that give authenticity to our words. A century and a half after the apostle Paul, believers were going through a period of terrible persecution. Yet the church continued to grow. Why? It was the Christian author Tertullian who recognized the reason when he wrote, “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, … how they are ready even to die for one another!”[1] Theirs was a love that also overflowed outside the Christian community to the poor, the destitute and the hungry, to widows and orphans. And it was through that love tangibly demonstrated that people also discovered the love of a Saviour. Through their integrity people encountered him who is the truth. And through their willingness to be tortured and even to die for their faith that people found him who came to bring life in all its fullness.

Conscious of our Power (14-19)

It is a calling of truly heroic proportions. But we will never live up to it unless we are conscious of the power that alone can make it a reality. We need always to be aware the light with which Jesus calls us to shine does not originate in us. It is a reflected light. And its source is the ineffable glory, the unquenchable love, the unchanging truth of Jesus himself. Paul writes about being strengthened in our inner being through the Holy Spirit’s power. And in verses 16 through 19 he gives us three images of how that happens. So let’s take a look at each of them briefly.

Paul first writes in verse 17 about Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. Many years ago (about as many years ago as when I was given The Gospel Blimp!) someone else introduced me to a little booklet entitled My Heart – Christ’s Home. It’s based on that verse which I am sure is familiar to most of us in Revelation 3, where Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” In it the author takes us through the various rooms of a house—the living room, where we relax; the dining room, where we eat; the study, where we read; the bedroom, and so on…

The whole point was that when you open your life to Jesus, it isn’t a matter of merely allowing him to stand in the entryway like some door-to-door salesperson. Rather, you are giving him free rein to move and to exercise his lordship throughout every room, every nook and cranny in the house: your thoughts and appetites, what you take into your mind through the books and media you read, the music you listen to, what you watch on TV and the internet and social media, your friendships, your sex life, your finances, your leisure time, and the list goes on…

Secondly, Paul calls us to be grounded in love. The image moves from a home to a forest. We are blessed with an almost endless forest behind our house. It stretches pretty well all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. But it is all on semi-swampy, rocky ground, which means that many of the trees can’t put down deep roots. So every time there’s a major windstorm (and we’ve had our share of them in recent years) there are trees that are blown over and end up falling to the ground and dying.

So how do we become properly rooted, so that the winds of temptation and misfortune and adversity don’t cause us to fall? I want to suggest three ways. We need to be grounded in holy Scripture—to spend time daily reading the Bible, seeking to grasp its meaning and then applying it to our lives. We need to be rooted in prayer—to bask in God’s great and unfathomable love in Christ and to lay our lives, our concerns and our deepest needs before him. And we need to be rooted in community, which means more than just spending an hour or so in church on a Sunday, but really engaging with God’s people, being nourished in an environment of mutual love and care.

So it is that, with Christ dwelling in our hearts and with our lives rooted and grounded in his love, we will find ourselves being filled to the brim with the fullness of God—and by his grace that fullness will overflow into and enrich the lives of others as well. That doesn’t mean that life will be easy or that we will always go around with a smile pasted on our face. Far from it! Christians are not immune to sorrow and tragedy. But it does mean that we are never alone in them. For we are graced with the constant presence of the one who has promised to be with us always, to the very end of time (Matthew 28:20).

Continuous in our Praise (20-21)

And so we are to be clear in our purpose and conscious of our power. Which brings us to our third point: and that is that we are to be continuous in our praise.

At this point my mind is drawn back years ago once again, when I was serving in a church in Montreal and we were graced with a visit from the Archbishop of Uganda. His name was Erica Sabiti. He had grown up in the church but it was only when he was in his thirties that he came into contact with the spiritual revival that was sweeping across East Africa at the time, and his life was forever transformed. In a word, he fell in love with Jesus.

I well remember the woman who was hosting him at one time remarking to me under her breath, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! All he ever talks about is Jesus. If I hear him even mention that name once more, I think I’m going to scream!” This was nearly forty years after his conversion, yet this man still found himself totally captivated by, utterly in love with Jesus.

It was clear that this man’s praise was no shallow, surface phenomenon. It sprang from a deep and unshakeable faith in God. Sabiti’s ministry as archbishop occurred during the tyrannous dictatorship of Idi Amin. And when Amin ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Uganda, Erica Sabiti opposed him publicly and stood up for them. He soon received a summons to appear before Amin, with every likelihood that, as with others who had taken a stand against him, the dictator would personally shoot him.

There was a tense two-hour wait before Amin appeared and sat down across from him. After what seemed an interminable period of silence, Amin burst out, “You Sabiti, do you know I can kill you? Why do you talk about the children of Israel?” Twice more Amin repeated the threat, after which the archbishop reached down into his bag and pulled out his Bible. Then, with a calmness in his voice he said, “Your Excellency, this Bible is full of the history of the Jews, so is your Koran. People have died because of the truth, which is in this Bible. The children of Israel are special because they are a chosen race and we shall talk about it.” Amin did not say a thing, but shook his head and walked out of the room.[2]

This was the man who could never stop praising Jesus. God grant that our worship in this place might powerfully engage our minds, stir our hearts and strengthen our wills. By his grace may it be a mighty upswelling of praise that arises out of a profound and unshakeable experience of God’s saving grace in Jesus—an experience week by week that accompanies and upholds us through all of life’s circumstances and irresistibly leads us ever deeper into him.

Paul’s God-given vision for the Christians in Ephesus was that they might be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power and continuous in praise. I’d like to conclude with Paul’s challenge to them, as Eugene Peterson powerfully worded it in The Message:

And I ask [God] to strengthen you by his Spirit … that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

---

[1] Tertullian, Apology, ch 39

[2] https://ugandansatheart.blogspot.com/2015/04/uah-emarchbishop-sabitis-near-fatal.html

“She lay at his feet” (Ruth 3:1-11)

 

When you think of a romance story what comes to your mind? For the more literary types among us it might be Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. For others of us perhaps it could be something more like one of the many dozens of novels of Danielle Steele. Or if you want to go all the way, there is Canada’s contribution to the genre, the epic Harlequin novels, whose output surpasses well over 100,000,000 copies every year under more than a thousand titles.

Yet, when it comes down to it, I don’t believe there is anything that can surpass the little story that we began to look at four Sundays ago—the Book of Ruth. The great German poet and playwright Goethe praised it as “the loveliest complete work on a small scale”. Rudolf Alexander Schröder, a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, declared, “No poet in the world has written a more beautiful short story.”

In the original Hebrew it comprises barely two thousand words—not that much longer than a good-sized high school essay. Yet even across an expanse of well over three thousand years after the events it portrays, it continues to speak to our hearts and to hold a beauty and an attractiveness that are impossible to surpass.

Now I’m not sure that Pastor Marvin intentionally timed it this way, but this evening at sundown will mark the beginning of the three-day Jewish festival of Shavuot. Shavuot is Hebrew for “weeks” and it gets its name because it comes seven weeks (that is, a week of weeks) after Passover. It coincides with the celebration accompanying the annual wheat and barley harvest—and it goes all the way back to the days of Moses. In the book of Exodus we read:

You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest… The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. (Exodus 34:22; 23:19)

So it is that the events we are reading about this morning from the Book of Ruth occurred at exactly this time of the year. And in Jewish homes and synagogues around the world this very evening people will be gathering to read the Book of Ruth. But that’s enough of an introduction to this morning’s passage. Let’s turn to chapter 3 of Ruth and see what the Holy Spirit has there to teach us…

Lying at Boaz’s feet

It has been a long day in Boaz’ fields. The temperatures in that part of the world at this time of year can easily climb into the low thirties on the Celsius scale. So picture Boaz and his farmhands at the end of the day—their faces red from the heat and running with beads of sweat, their backs and muscles aching. And now, having enjoyed a hearty meal, their stomachs would have been full—and I can imagine they may all have been feeling a little heady from the wine. So it could hardly have taken them long to fall into a deep and well-deserved sleep.

All of this would no doubt have been in Naomi’s mind when she pulled aside her daughter-in-law Ruth. Naomi had a plan. She had mapped it out carefully and worked out every detail. “Wash and anoint yourself with perfume. Get all dressed up in your finest clothes and go down to the threshing floor. But don’t let him know you’re there until the party is well under way and he’s had plenty to eat and drink. When the man lies down and falls asleep, keep an eye out for where he is resting. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down…”[1]

Now at this point you may be asking yourself, what was that all about? What was going through Naomi’s mind when she gave Ruth those instructions? And what was the point of bending down to uncover Boaz’s feet?

If we look through the Old Testament, we will find that this is not the only place where something not all that different from this takes place. Many years later, for example, in the days of the kings there was a Shunammite woman whose son the prophet Elisha had miraculously brought back from death. When she entered her son’s room and set her eyes on him—no longer dead but very much alive—she bowed down to the ground and fell at Elisha’s feet. (2 Kings 4:32-37)

Then when we turn to the Psalms, we read how

The Lord, the Most High, is to be feared,
  a great king over all the earth.
He subdued peoples under us,
    and nations under our feet. (Psalm 47:2-3)

To place ourselves at the feet of another person is an act of respect and submission. It is to acknowledge the power, the authority, of that individual. Feet are dirty, particularly if you’re wearing sandals and working the soil. So for Ruth to lie at Boaz’s feet was a powerful symbolic act that she was humbling herself in his presence, placing herself under his authority, giving herself over to him.

Now remember that before she lay down Ruth had carefully uncovered Boaz’s feet. And just as it can become quite hot during the day, the temperature under the starlit sky can go down by fifteen or more degrees—with the result that Boaz was likely to have felt his feet becoming a little chilly in the early morning pre-dawn hours and woken up. And when he looked up, there to his surprise was that same young woman whom he had spotted gleaning in his fields. “Who are you?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “I am Ruth, your servant…,” came the reply.

Falling at Jesus’ feet

Now I’m going to leave the story of Ruth there. And let’s fast forward ahead nearly twelve centuries, to the time of Jesus. We are by the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is being followed by a large crowd. Suddenly out of nowhere one of the prominent leaders of the local synagogue rushes up to him and falls at his feet. It is an act of desperation. His little girl is at the point of death and he has nowhere else to turn (Luke 8:41).

On another occasion Jesus is in Gentile territory in an attempt to take a break and get away from things. Yet even there his fame follows him and a Greek woman, whose daughter is demon possessed, finds out about him and falls at his feet, begging him to free her from her affliction. (Mark 7:24-26)

Now we move south to Bethany, just fourteen kilometers from the fields where Boaz in a former time had raised his crops and where Ruth had lain at his feet. This time we are not in a farmer’s field, but in the home of a well-to-do Pharisee, where he has invited Jesus to dinner. There they were, reclining around the low table and enjoying the food, when out of nowhere there appears a woman who was known (perhaps embarrassingly to some of those who were present) to have something of a less-than-honourable reputation.

Silently weeping, she comes up from behind, kneels down and begins to wipe Jesus’ feet with her tears, to kiss them, and to rub perfume on them with her hair. I can only imagine that the people around the room tried to look aside with silent gasps, as nobody could think of words to say. When someone finally did speak, it was with harsh criticism. But Jesus recognized that what she had done was a profound act of devotion. (Luke 7:36-38)

Again in Bethany we are at the home of the two sisters Mary and Martha. While Martha is busying herself over pots and pans in the kitchen, Mary is at Jesus’ feet drinking in all that he has to say. Finally Martha gets fed up to the point that she complains. But Jesus replies, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38-42)

Now I cite all of these incidents because they are not isolated. In each case the people involved were recognizing Jesus’ divine power and authority. And they anticipate the day when we will do the same, when with them and with all creation you and I will bend our knees before the throne of the Lamb. And together we will cry aloud,

To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honour and glory and power,
for ever and ever! (Revelation 5:13)

Jesus washes the disciples’ feet

It is a glorious picture. And if we were to end here, we would certainly be leaving on a high note. Yet if we are to gain a fully biblical perspective, if we want to truly find the mind of Christ in all of this, there is one more incident that we dare not overlook. This time we are in the upper room where Jesus is about to share in his last meal with his followers.

As the scene opens, the gospel gives us a glimpse into what was going on in Jesus’ mind. John writes, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper…” And then, what did he do? John tells us, “He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it round his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” (John 13:3-4)

At this point we might think to ourselves, shouldn’t it have been the disciples who bent down before Jesus’ feet? But no, it was Jesus who knelt before them and washed their feet. Now Peter recognized the craziness of this and objected loudly. “No, you shall never wash my feet!” But Jesus had his way and Peter and the other disciples learned a lesson that would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

So what are we to learn from all of this?

My thoughts go back many years ago to when I was pastor of a church in Montreal. Each year our local seminary would send a student to spend time in the church and to gain some practical experience of pastoral ministry.

Now there was a retired bishop who lived in the seminary at the time. He was a deeply godly man who would be up every morning well before sunrise to take time with the Lord in Bible reading, worship and prayer. And he had the look and sound of a bishop too, with his white hair and sonorous, resonant voice. One day he invited my student to join with him in a ministry he had, visiting patients in the local chest hospital. They came to one man whose illness was so serious he had to be on breathing assistance and was unable to do anything for himself. The bishop, who always wore his clerical collar and bishop’s purple shirt with his large pectoral cross draped over it, asked if there was anything he could do for him. My student expected that the man might ask for prayer or perhaps a Bible reading. But he was caught by surprise when the man answered, “Yes, would you give me a shave?”

Without a moment’s hesitation the good bishop went off and found a razor, some shaving soap and a basin, filled it with warm water and gave the man his shave. It was a lesson in humble service that my student would never forget (and obviously neither have I!).

“You call me Teacher and Lord,” said Jesus, “and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant^[ is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” (John 13:13-17)

As Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz, so our Lord Jesus—the one before whom every knee will one day bow—this same Jesus calls you and me to walk that same path of humility and servanthood, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” (Matthew 20:28) Are you ready for the adventure?

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[1]     Taken from The Message version by Eugene Peterson