“Why did Jesus have to be baptized?” (Matthew 3:13-17)

My Oxford Dictionary defines the word “eccentric” as “odd or capricious in behaviour or appearance; whimsical”. I suspect there are a number of us who have had either friends or relatives they might describe as eccentric. I had an uncle who at one time ran a Shell gas station. Whether it was to save money or because he liked the colours, I don’t know, but he painted the exterior of his house in the same yellow and red. The neighbours didn’t like it, but it sure made it easy to find.

I don’t know if the statistics would bear me out, but it seems to me that the greatest concentration of eccentric people is to be found in the British Isles. There was, for instance, an officer of the British army in World War 2 known as “mad Jack Churchill”. He lived by the motto, “Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”—and the sword he was referring to was the Scottish broadsword. In addition to his sword, he occasionally used a longbow. Early in the war he ambushed a German patrolman, shooting him with a barbed arrow. His shot earned him the title of the only British soldier to have felled an enemy with a longbow during the war.

Delving farther back into history, there was William Buckland. He was a clergyman and a brilliant geologist and palaeontologist, who lived in the early nineteenth century. He was known to have occasionally delivered his lectures on horseback and his obsession with the animal kingdom knew no bounds. The result was that his home was literally a zoo. Besides this, he was famous for eating animals of every species and placing them before his dinner guests. Various people who sat at his table recall being served panther, crocodile and mouse. Among the few creatures that did not suit his taste buds were moles and bluebottle flies.

Perhaps he was not as far along the eccentricity spectrum as William Buckland or Jack Churchill, but I do believe there is an argument that the man we meet with in this morning’s Bible reading falls somewhere into that category. He is John the Baptist (or John the Baptizer). Matthew describes John’s clothes as being made from camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waste, and that he lived on a diet of locusts and wild honey. (As an aside, locust eating probably wasn’t all that eccentric. Locusts were commonly eaten by the poorer people of that region and were an efficient source of protein.)

John’s message was uncompromising. He had no fear about exposing the hypocrisy of religious leaders, the corrupt practices of the tax collectors or the bullying tactics of the Roman soldiers—and ultimately his fearless denunciations would lead to his death. At the same time there were those who found John’s challenging message of repentance deeply attractive. And they came in droves to the grassy banks of the Jordan River.

However, John always recognized that his mission was only an anticipation of something far greater. And he knew its fulfilment was around the corner when one day he spotted Jesus in the crowd. “I baptize with water,” he said, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (John 1:26-27; Matthew 3:11-12). Then something that had never entered John’s mind began to happen. Jesus walked forward and stepped down into the water. John was aghast. “I’m the one who needs to be baptized by you,” he protested. “So what are you doing coming to me?”

And that’s the question I want to ask this morning. Why did Jesus feel the need to be baptized? And what did he mean when he said it was “to fulfil all righteousness”? I think the answer is threefold.

Submission

In the baptism of Jesus the gospels give us a unique picture of the Holy Trinity. As the Son emerges from the water, we see the Holy Spirit coming down as a dove and alighting on him, and we hear the voice of the Father pronouncing, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Before I say anything else, let me state that at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity there will always remain a mystery. We can skirt around the edges of it, but we can never fully penetrate it. Theologians have sought to clarify it, yet sometimes their explanations can leave us more confused than when we began. The most helpful approach I have found is through the picture of a dance. Eugene Peterson put it this way:

Imagine a folk dance, a round dance, with three partners in each set. The music starts up and the partners holding hands begin moving in a circle. On a signal from the caller, they release hands, change partners, and weave in and out, swinging first one and then another. The tempo increases, the partners move more swiftly with and between and among one another, swinging and twirling, embracing and releasing, holding on and letting go. But there is no confusion; every movement is cleanly coordinated in precise rhythms … as each person maintains [their] identity. To the onlooker, the movements are so swift it is impossible at times to distinguish one person from another; the steps are so intricate that it is difficult to anticipate the actual configuration as they appear.[1]

So it is, at the baptism of Jesus, that for a brief moment in time the curtain is lifted and we are given a glimpse of the eternal dance of the Trinity—a still shot, if you will. Here we see the Son empowered by the Spirit in humble and willing submission to the Father. And that is Jesus’ posture not only at his baptism but throughout his ministry, and indeed through eternity.

We hear it repeatedly from his own lips: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work,” Jesus told his followers (John 4:34). “I do not seek to please myself but him who sent me” (John 5:30). “I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me” (John 14:31). And we see his unwavering commitment to that purpose most poignantly demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. There we find Jesus falling with his face to the ground as he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).

As Jesus stepped down into the Jordan to be submerged under the water, then, it was not as an act of repentance as John supposed, but as a public witness for all to see, to his complete commitment to the Father’s will. As he would later tell his followers, “I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

Solidarity

There is a second purpose that underlies Jesus’ baptism. That is, that it was not only an act of submission to the Father’s will but also an indication of his solidarity with the human race—with you and with me. Jesus was demonstrating in a visible, physical way that he is one with us, one of us.

Some of you may remember when the Queen visited Halifax in 1994. Part of her itinerary was to take her along Barrington Street. At that time Barrington was already well down along its slide from its former glory in the first half of the century. “Seedy” and “run down” would be a kind way to describe the way it looked. So the government spent thousands of dollars on temporary cosmetic improvements to some of the surrounding buildings. The result was that the street took on the appearance more of a movie set than of a real place. For some reason someone among the powers-that-be was of the opinion that the Queen should not be exposed to things as they really were.

Well, not so with the Son of God. When Jesus came to our world, he did not come as a visiting dignitary. The opening verses of John’s gospel emphatically tell us that the eternal Son of God became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). As preachers such as myself are keen to point out, a literal translation of that verse is that “he pitched his tent among us”. What that means is that Jesus did not just come for an overnight visit—touch down, see a few of the sights and then fly off again. And he did not live in a palace, surrounded by all the luxury that this world is able to provide. No, he came as an ordinary man and over the course of thirty-three or however many years, experienced all that it is to be human.

Being baptized in the muddy waters of the Jordan was for Jesus a concrete way of conveying that this was what he was doing. As he plunged under the water, he was physically identifying with all those who were responding to John’s message—not standing on the bank in silent observation but throwing himself in with our lot, becoming one with us, immersing himself in our condition and all that that entails.

Sacrifice

Jesus’ baptism, then, was an outward and visible sign of his total submission to the Father’s will. And it was a sign of his solidarity with you and me in our human lot. But I believe there was also a third meaning to be found in what he did that day. And it is revealed in a couple of conversations he had with his followers some time later.

The first of them came while Jesus was teaching a large crowd. He had warned them in a parable of how they must be ready for the coming of the Son of Man. At that point Peter came to him privately and asked if the parable was just for them or for everyone. Part of Jesus’ response consisted of these words: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50) I can only imagine that Peter must have been mystified by those words. Nevertheless they stuck with him and lodged in his mind.

On another occasion two of Jesus’ followers came to him asking, “Let us sit at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory.” To which Jesus replied, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” (Mark 10:38) Again Jesus’ words were met with incomprehension.

Yet, while the disciples failed to grasp the implications of what Jesus was saying at the time, it became clear to them later that what he had been referring to was his death. So it was that, even at this beginning point in his ministry, there loomed before him the shadow of the cross. As Jesus descended into the waters of the River Jordan, he was also looking ahead to the day when he would be plunged into the deeper waters of death—when he would willingly offer himself up for you and for me on the cross.

There he would take upon himself not only our humanity but our sin. There he would bear the full weight of our waywardness and rebellion. And he did it so that you and I might be freed to be the men and women that God created us to be, to be human in the truest, fullest sense. He did it so that you and I might join in the joyful dance of the Trinity and one day hear our Father’s voice pronouncing, “This is my beloved son, this is my beloved daughter…”

Today, as we remember the baptism of Jesus, may it help us to recognize him as the one and only Son of God, completely submissive to the Father’s will. May we know his presence, walking alongside us, sharing our joys and our pains, our hopes and our disappointments. And may we live in gratitude that the road that began with his baptism was the road that led him to Calvary—that he was pierced for our transgressions and that by his wounds we have been healed.

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[1]     Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 44-45

“What Isaiah Saw” (Isaiah 2:1-5)

For the past ten weeks we have been making our way through what is called the “Narrative Lectionary”. It is a scheme that has been designed to take us through the whole broad sweep of God’s revelation in Scripture over a four-year period. And so far it has been quite literally a whirlwind tour. Just as a whirlwinds sweep across the countryside, touching down at this point and that, so we have touched down on the story of Noah and the flood; the call of Abraham; the roller coaster fortunes of Joseph; the escape of the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt; the giving of the Ten Commandments; the renewal of Israel’s covenant with God under Joshua; the long reign of King Solomon; the prophet Elisha’s cleansing of the leprous Syrian general Naaman; and then last week the prophet Micah’s call “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”. Today we come to Isaiah.

Micah and Isaiah were both what we call prophets. Their words are recorded in the last one-third of the books of the Old Testament. They wrote in different places under a variety of circumstances. And their writings comprise a wide diversity of styles—from lofty poetry to heartbreaking lament, from strange visions to biting satire.

Here is what Eugene Peterson had to say about the prophets:

These men and women woke people up to the sovereign presence of God… They used words with power and imagination… The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions… Over and over again God the Holy Spirit uses these prophets … to put [his people] back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. Prophets train us in … keeping present to the presence of God… They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground… Nothing escapes the purposes of God.[1]

There are seventeen books in the Old Testament that are ascribed to the prophets. But the one that seems to rise above them all is Isaiah. It is from Isaiah that we will soon read at Christmastime: “To us a child is born, to us a son is given…” (9:6). It was from Isaiah that Jesus quoted at the outset of his mission: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (61:1-2). It is to Isaiah that we look when we want to make sense of Jesus’ crucifixion: “He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by his wounds we are healed” (53:5). And thirteen out of the thirty-four biblical texts in Handel’s Messiah are taken from Isaiah.

Again Eugene Peterson has written,

Isaiah is a large presence in the lives of people who … are on the lookout for the holy… Isaiah is the supreme poet-prophet to come out of the Hebrew people… Isaiah does not merely convey information. He creates visions, delivers revelation, arouses belief. He is a poet in the most fundamental sense—a maker, making God present and that presence urgent.[2]

A Vision

In our passage this morning Isaiah opens with the words, “This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw…” This is the second of four times that Isaiah will say this about himself. The first is in the opening verse of the book and it more or less summarizes all that he is going to put into writing in the chapters that follow.

The third comes in chapter 6 as Isaiah stood worshipping in the Temple. I suspect that for everybody else who was present that day there was nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual psalms and prayers and sacrifices. But to Isaiah there was revealed the ineffable mystery that stood behind it all: the presence of the Lord of heaven and earth. Even the vastness of Solomon’s Temple could contain no more than the train of his robe, as six-winged seraphs sang aloud, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:1-3).

I can imagine the other worshippers glibly walking away from the Temple that day. Had there been a fellowship hall they might have gone for a cup of coffee and a few minutes of chitchat—and then back to their usual routines. But for Isaiah things could never be the same. His eyes had been opened to hidden realities. He had seen the Lord.

If we had read further on from the story of Naaman a few weeks ago, we would have come to another incident in the story of Elisha. It was dawn and his servant had gotten up to prepare for the day, when he saw a sight that terrified him to the bone. As he looked around, he could see that all the hills surrounding the city were filled with the chariots and horses of an enemy army. All he could think to do was to run to his master and shake him. “What are we going to do now?” he asked in fear and desperation. I can’t imagine it helped when Elisha responded, “Don’t be afraid. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” With that he stood up and prayed, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” And this time when the servant looked around he could see an even greater army arrayed in protection around the city, with horses and chariots of fire (2 Kings 6:15-17).

Much the same was true of those two followers of Jesus as they were making their way back to their home in Emmaus a couple of days after the crucifixion. Why didn’t they recognize the stranger who so convincingly opened the Scriptures to them? Luke tells us that it was only as he broke the bread at the table with them that their eyes were opened and they recognized that they were in the presence of Jesus.

Now I am not suggesting that we should all be dreaming dreams and seeing visions. That is the privilege of the few. But what I do want to say is that a large part of following Jesus is learning to see the world, to see our lives, from a radically different perspective. “Do not be conformed to this world,” wrote the apostle Paul to the Romans, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is” (Romans 12:2).

I recall a member of my church years ago sharing with me how important it was for her to be there Sunday by Sunday. Because it was in that weekly encounter with God and his word that she was renewed in a vision and an approach to the world that was often diametrically opposite from what she was being told through the rest of the week. As we follow Jesus we will inevitably begin to see ourselves and our world from a new perspective. So what was it that Isaiah saw in our passage this morning?

A Mountain

I have never been to Jerusalem or to the Holy Land, but I understand that Mount Zion, the hill on which Jerusalem stands, is not especially impressive. There were much more imposing sites in the mountains to the north and to the south. Mount Lebanon, Mount Hermon, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal all have higher elevations, to name only a few peaks in the region. And even the Mount of Olives, just a short distance away, stands taller than Jerusalem itself. Yet in Isaiah’s vision Mount Zion towers above all other mountains. And as we look more closely, what do we find but people from every land and nation streaming towards it.

Now under normal circumstances, that would be something not to be welcomed but to be feared. The tiny kingdom of Israel (or Judah as it was known in Isaiah’s time) was precariously situated on a crossroads between powerful empires—Assyria to the north, the Medes and the Persians to the east, and Egypt to the south. As a result, except for brief historical intervals, Jerusalem was under almost constant threat of assault from one direction or another.

Later on, in chapters 36 and 37, Isaiah gives his own eyewitness account of exactly this kind of scenario. Sennacherib, the king of the vast Assyrian empire, after sweeping through the little kingdom of Judah and conquering all its fortified cities, sent his field commander to Jerusalem to negotiate terms of surrender. Isaiah tells how in desperation King Hezekiah tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and sent a delegation to seek his advice. Isaiah’s words to the king were the same as those of Elisha’s to his servant a century before: “Do not be afraid.” So Hezekiah went into the Temple and prayed for deliverance for his people. And that was exactly what happened. We aren’t given the details, but Isaiah tells us that the angel of the Lord put to death 185,000 of Sennacherib’s men.

The scene that Isaiah puts before us this morning, however, is entirely different. This vast, numberless horde of people, streaming in from every corner of the globe, is coming not to invade or to conquer but to learn and to be reconciled. The promise made to Abraham centuries before is at last coming to fruition: “I will make you into a great nation … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3).

All of this stands in marked contrast to another scene in the Bible: the tower of Babel. Babel was the product of human arrogance and pride. It was founded on the assumption that there is no height that we cannot scale, nothing that ought to lie outside the reach of our grasp. On the other hand, what lies at the core of the passage before us is a deep and genuine humility in the presence of God, a willingness to learn from him—to put down the weapons of human conflict and striving and to surrender to his pure and peaceable rule.

An Invitation

As we look at this amazing scene we are offered an invitation: “Come …, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Now my natural inclination is to interpret those words as saying, “Let us learn to live according to God’s truth.” (I have no doubt I’ve been influenced at this point by that old gospel hymn that begins, “When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word…”) But Old Testament scholar John Goldingay points us to Psalm 44:3. There we find what I think is a better interpretation. Here is what it says: “It was not by their sword that [our ancestors] won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was by your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them.”[3]

We find the same idea embedded in the blessing that we so often hear at the conclusion of our worship: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). So the invitation that we are being given here is to live in the recognition that behind everything in the universe there is a God who looks upon us and loves us. And it would be on Isaiah’s mountain that that love was most clearly and powerfully demonstrated.

Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). Years later the apostle Paul would write, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 3:19-20).

The first believers were privileged to see the beginning of the fulfilment of that promise, as men and women and children from all over the known world responded to Peter’s message at Pentecost. And I suspect that they would be amazed to see how far the good news of God’s love in Christ has spread today, reaching out to peoples and nations they could never have dreamed of.

Yet we still await the day when Isaiah’s vision comes in its fullness: when people from every nation will gather around the throne of God, their swords beaten into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, with the Lord as their everlasting light. In the meantime, it is so fitting that this church should choose to call itself “All Nations”. May that name impel us to live out the vision that God gave to Isaiah. And may we be unceasing in sharing the light of his love with people of every background and colour, tribe, language and nation.

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[1]     Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 115-117

[2]     Introduction to Isaiah in The Message.

[3]     Isaiah, New International Biblical Commentary, 44

“The Way of Folly” (Psalm 14)

On my bookshelves I have a little volume entitled The Darwin Awards. In case you’ve never heard of the Darwin Awards, here is how its author Wendy Northcutt describes them:

Darwin Awards commemorate those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion… To qualify, nominees must improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race using astonishingly stupid means.”[1]

Here is one example from 2005:

One fateful afternoon, 55-year-old Marko retreated to his workshop to make himself a tool for chimney cleaning. The chimney was too high for a simple broom to work, but if he could attach a brush to a chain and then weigh it down with something, that would do the trick. But what could he use as a weight? He happened to have the perfect object. It was heavy, yet compact. And best of all, it was made of metal, so he could weld it to the chain. He must have somehow overlooked the fact that it was also a hand grenade…[2]

I will spare you the gruesome details.

In this morning’s reading from the psalms we meet with a character who makes not infrequent appearances on the pages of the Bible. And while they do not strictly qualify for a Darwin Award, they surely fall into a related category. I am referring to the fool.

In our New International Version Bibles, the word “fool” occurs 182 times—and seventy-two of those occasions are found in the book of Proverbs, where we encounter them in little aphorisms such as these:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. (1:7)

The waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. (1:32)

The wise inherit honour, but fools get only shame. (3:35)

The wise in heart accept commands, but a chattering fool comes to ruin. (10:8)

We meet with fools in the New Testament as well, particularly in the teachings of Jesus. Perhaps you remember the story of the two house builders—the wise man who built his house on bedrock and his foolish counterpart who went ahead and built his on the sand. Or how about Jesus’ dramatic parable of the rich landowner who spent all his time building more and bigger barns to store his crops? God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.” And the apostle Paul counsels us, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is” (Ephesians 5:17).

But of all the references to fools in the Bible, it is surely the opening verse of the psalm we have read this morning, Psalm 14:1, that has to be the best known: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”

A definition

Author and preacher Eugene Peterson suggests that there are three kinds of atheists in the world. The first are what he describes as subscribing to an atheism that develops out of protest.

Angry about what is wrong with the world, they are roused to passionate defiance. That a good God permits the birth of crippled children, that a loving God allows rape and torture, that a sovereign God stands aside while the murderous régime of a Genghis Khan or an Adolf Hitler runs its course—such outrageous paradoxes cannot be countenanced. So God is eliminated.[3]

A second brand of atheism can often be the result of a quest for intellectual honesty. It is the atheism of the person who has rejected the childish distortions of God that New Testament translator J.B. Phillips described in his little book Your God is Too Small: the celestial killjoy, the parental hangover, the grand old man with a beard, the heavenly bellhop… And on the list goes. But of course as Christians we reject all those false notions as well.

These kinds of atheism [writes Peterson] can be treated with appreciation and respect. The passionately protesting atheist, sensitive to suffering, can be welcomed as a partner in the spiritual and moral struggle against evil… The intellectually discriminating atheist can be accepted as an ally in skeptically rejecting all the popular, half-baked stupidities named “god” that abound in our time…[4]

However, the Bible is not launching a diatribe against atheists of either of those two varieties. For one thing, that kind of unbelief didn’t exist in the ancient Middle East 1000 years BC when David was writing. Atheism, at least as we know it today and represented by writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens (who have been dubbed the four horsemen of atheism!), is a relatively recent phenomenon.

So who is this psalm about? A more literal rendering of the Hebrew text might help us to understand. Word-for-word the original text runs like this: “The fool says in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” The words “there is” are not there in the Hebrew. They have been supplied by our English translators in the interests of rendering the verse into more fluent English. So what the psalm is referring to is not someone who doesn’t believe in God, but a person who has chosen to ignore God—someone who has decided either that God does not matter or that God has no particular interest in what they do, whether good or bad.

More than that, notice that the fool does not utter this decision aloud. It is a denial that lies hidden deep within the confines of his heart. To quote Peterson once again,

This is a quiet, unobtrusive atheism … These people do not say with their mouths, “There is no God.” To the contrary, they say with their mouths what everyone else says about God. They recite the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer along with the best of them. With their mouths they articulate impressive arguments for God’s existence. With their mouths they demand public prayers and official religion. But in their hearts they say, “There is no God.”[5]

Thus it becomes clear that the word “fool” in the Bible has nothing to do with intelligence or brains. Rather, it is a moral category. A fool is someone who has chosen to live life without reference to God. And as a consequence they have no sense of moral responsibility. We hear more about this sort of individual in Psalm 10:

     He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
     in all his thoughts there is no room for God…
     Your laws are rejected by him …
He says to himself, “Nothing will ever shake me.”
     He swears, “No one will ever do me harm.” (Psalm 10:4-6)

The apostle Paul offers a stinging criticism of the same kind of person in the opening chapter of his letter to the Romans:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them… Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-19,21-22)

A denunciation

I can imagine that if you had heard only the first verse of this psalm, you might be tempted to mentally gaze around your workplace or among your relatives and maybe come up with some suitable candidates—and you probably wouldn’t need much time! Without wishing to be too political, I suspect there are not a few among us who might be tempted point to certain politicians—I’ll leave it to you to choose your favourite.

But before we become too smug, we need to look at the second half of the verse. And what do we find there? The focus shifts, first from the singular (“The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God’ ”) to the plural (“They are corrupt, their deeds are vile”), and then it becomes universal: “There is no one who does good.” And to make his point perfectly clear, the psalmist continues,

The Lord looks down from heaven on the human race
to see if there are any who understand,
     any who seek God.
All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
     there is no one who does good,
     not even one.

We begin to realize that if a finger is pointing anywhere, it is pointing at us all. It is pointing at you. It is pointing at me. There are no exceptions.

Jesus made the point dramatically in the course of that famous incident of the woman caught in adultery. The men had already made a public spectacle of her and were ready to stone her. But then Jesus challenged them, “Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.” And the silence that followed was deafening.

Could this be why Jesus warned his followers, “Anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell”? Because folly is the universal human condition. Because there are times in our lives—in my own case, I know there are times every day—when we live without reference to God, when we put God on the back burner, when we choose to travel the road that is broad, because things are so much easier, so much more convenient, without him. We read those early chapters of Genesis thinking they are about someone else, when in reality they are about us. We miss the point that I am Adam; I am Eve.

A deliverance

After all of this, is it any wonder that the psalmist should cry aloud in verse 7, “Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion”? The deliverance we need is as much from our own foolishness as the foolishness of others. And God has chosen to do it through what the Bible calls the foolishness of the cross.

A crown of thorns was shoved mockingly on his head, a purple robe on his back, as the soldiers slapped his face and spat on him and ridiculed him with the words, “Hail, king of the Jews.” A notice was placed above his head in derision: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The passers-by laughingly shouted, “You who were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” The religious leaders sneered, “He saved others, but he can’t save himself!” For all who witnessed the cross on that fateful day, the man who hung there was a fool. What they did not know was that in his suffering and death Jesus was taking into himself the consequences of their folly—and of yours and mine.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18,20,22-25)

That the creator of heaven and earth should take upon himself our mortal flesh… That the one who rides upon the heavens should be born as a helpless baby in a broken and persecuted nation… That the hands that formed the dry land and spread out the stars in the sky should be fastened to a cross… It all seems like foolishness. It contradicts every tenet of human logic. But it is the way in which our gracious God has chosen in the lavishness and mystery of his grace.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” cried the apostle Paul. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33-34). “The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” We may abandon God. Thank God that he has not abandoned us!

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[1]     The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection, 2,3

[2]     http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2005-09.html

[3]     Earth & Altar, 107

[4]    Earth & Altar, 109

[5]     Earth & Altar, 109