Genesis 8:1-9:17: Worshiping in God's New World

Have you ever gone out on a limb to meet someone half way?  If you knew the person, maybe you didn’t feel like it was that much of a risk.  But if you didn’t, the experience was probably an anxious one.  There is a period of time when you feel vulnerable.  You’ve laid your cards on the table, and you wait for what seems like an eternity to see what the other person has in their hand. 

That’s probably what it was like for Noah.  He builds the ark in obedience to God, and then he leads his family onto the gigantic boat.  No matter how great Noah’s faith, there had to be that small voice that seemed to get louder with each moment that the rain didn’t come, “God has forgotten you, and you’ll look like a fool”. 

That voice was silenced with the coming of the rain.  Did it start with just the trickle of a few rain drops, and then crescendo into a downpour?  Or, were the full might of the rain and the fountains of the deep bursting forth unleashed in one moment, one powerful deluge?  We don’t know exactly how it happened, but one thing we do know is that God remembered Noah.  When we say that God remembered Noah, it doesn’t mean that for a while God had forgotten him.  In Hebrew, “remember” means to act on a previous covenant, not “to forget”.  God had made a promise to Noah, and in sealing Noah in the ark, God remembers and acts on that promise.  Remembering is not just a corrective action taken after something slips our memory.  Remembering can be proactive in nature.  When we greet a friend with a card on their birthday and they respond, “You remembered!”  Or, when we stand by the graveside of a loved one and promise ourselves that we will always remember the impact that they made on our lives.  Old Testament scholar Brevard S. Childs would say that “God remembering always implies his movement towards the object of his memory”, so that in a way when we say God “remembered” Noah what we are really saying is that God drew near to him. 

When God remembers Noah, He by extension remembers humankind.  When the flood waters subside and Noah worships, God is “reminded” of the positive side of humanity.  Because Noah demonstrated humanity’s ability to be faithful, even if that faithfulness isn’t perfect, God’s heart was transformed.  Whereas before the flood “the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6), after the flood “the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth…’” (Genesis 8:21).  After the flood, the new history begins with an altar.  Noah’s first act is to build this altar and worship God.  It is the first time an altar appears in the Bible.  Lest we think that the construction of the altar sanctions the sacred/secular divide, we should take note that part of worship is obedience not just at the altar, but during the whole period leading up to our arrival there.  While the altar isn’t built until the end of the flood, Noah’s whole life was worship because of his obedience.  Noah was so obedient, that he didn’t even leave the ark until God commanded him to do so.  In the words of noted theologian and church reformer John Calvin, “How great must have been the fortitude of the man, who, after the incredible wariness of a whole year, when the deluge has ceased, and new life has shone forth, does not yet move a foot out of his sepulcher, without the command of God.”   What would the altar have meant if Noah had approached it in disobedience?  What if Noah had come to the altar simply to go through the motions, all the while living his life in disobedience and open rebellion towards God?  Even more important, what does our own worship mean if our lives don’t mirror our actions at the altar?  In worshipping, genuinely and wholeheartedly, we express our gratitude to God for the new beginning that he has brought about, not just in Noah, but more importantly in Jesus Christ. 

As residents of this new world, worship is not just our response to salvation, but something we enter into as we live out our redemption.  In Noah’s case, part of the reminder was not just in worship, but in nature itself.  God places the rainbow in the sky so that when humanity gazes upon it, they will remember their collective experience through Noah of judgment, but also redemption.  When commenting on the rainbow, Franz Delitzsch said that, “Stretched between heaven and earth, it is a bond of peace between both, and, spanning the horizon, it points to the all-embracing universality of Divine mercy.”  Many believe that the rainbow is meant to symbolize an actual bow turned on its side, a weapon of war hung up never to be used again.  According to Franz Delitzsch, “The symbol of divine bellicosity and hostility has been transformed into a token of reconciliation between God and man.”  This is not the only reminder we have of judgment and redemption.  As Christians God has given us two acts which inform our identity as the redeemed people of God.  The first of these acts is our baptism.  When we remember our baptism, we should at the same time remember our identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Apostle Paul writes to the Romans, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4)  In addition to this initiatory act, we regularly gather together as Christians around our Lord’s Table, all the while proclaiming the truth about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  Paul reminds the church in Corinth of this when he writes, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” (I Corinthians 11:26)

These reminders come to us not just to bring comfort concerning what God has done, but to convict us of what should be doing as His people.  They remind us that God has opened up the possibility of a new world.  However, the possibility of a new world will forever be a dream deferred unless we adopt Noah’s faith and obedience for our own life.  God calls us to bring forth a new world where the worth of every human is respected.  God’s image in man is why he saves humanity, and is why the worth of every human must be maintained.  When human lives are taken, John Calvin says, “God deems himself violated in the violation of these persons.”  God calls us to boldly live out the reality that the Holy Spirit abides with us in this world.   Despite our failings, God is committed to His promise to never again destroy the earth with a flood.  Theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said it this way: “The only thing the waters of chaos and death do not cut through (though they cut through everything else) is the commitment of God to creation.”  Finally, and most importantly, we are to go tell the world that God continues to save.  The story of the flood shows us that redemption has happened before.  Redemption however, is not limited to the past.  Redemption is in the present as well, with God bearing us through the waters in an ark as sturdy as any ship ever built.  The Apostle Peter would write to a group of Christians persecuted by the world, and encourage them to imagine how they were living as present-day Noahs:

 “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God's will, than for doing evil. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.  Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.”(I Peter 3:17-21)

Do we trust that God can bear us through the waters of sin and death just as surely as he bore Noah and his family through the flood?  If we truly trust in God’s redemptive work, will we worship not just at the altar, but with lives of obedience as a present-day Noah?  Or, will we be washed away by the consequences of our own rebelliousness and pride?       

Mark 15:1-15: being Barabbas

With the benefit of hindsight we look at Jesus’ trial in Mark 15:1-15, and we can’t help but feel heartbreak.  How is it, why is it, that the Son of God who came and showed such compassion, such love for those around him, now stands alone, rejected by the very ones he can to save?  We come to this story again and again in frustration and in sorrow.  We come in frustration because in our estimation things should have gone differently, and in sorrow because we realize that it is because of our own sin that things had to be this way.  It is possible, I think, to also come away from this passage with not only frustration and sorrow, but also insight.  Is it possible that we can find in this story not just redemption for our souls, but also redemption from the thinking that brought the world to this time and place? 

To begin with, I’d offer the observation that when it comes to Jesus, we should never accept an imitation.  It seems like an obvious statement to make, but we are as prone to being fooled as the crowds that turned on Jesus that Good Friday.  Barabbas’ name, which is translated “son of the Father”, was a popular name among rabbis.  In Matthew 27:16 Barabbas is supplied with the first name Jesus, so that the crowd chooses between two Jesus- a situation rich in irony.  The Jesus in view here, Jesus Barabbas, was somehow tied to an insurrection, perhaps to a patriotic movement for independence from Rome.  This puts him more in line with what people would expect in a messiah, and thus when given the choice between two Jesus’, the crowd chooses the one that fits their expectations.  Barabbas stands as a model for all false messiahs, promising victory but bringing suffering.  Such was the experience of Jews in Palestine throughout the centuries surrounding Jesus’ life, whenever they bought into the hope offered by such men.  The true messiah, Jesus Christ, succeeds beyond all our expectations, promising suffering that leads to ultimate victory.  When given the choice of messiahs, which one do we choose?  Do we choose the real one, or the one that fits our idea of what a messiah should be?

If we are going to learn to follow the true Messiah, the one who offers a path of suffering that leads to ultimate victory, we will have to learn that we cannot go with the crowd.  We see the crown shouting out in complete and enthusiastic condemnation of Jesus.  The last time “shout out” was used was to describe the crowds enthusiastic greeting of Jesus during his entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:9)  In the span of a few chapters Jesus has gone from being hailed as messiah, to being deemed deserving of the worst death imaginable.  How can a crowd so quickly swing from one extreme to the other?  In this instance, it is evident that the chief priests have control of the crowd, and are able to guide them to fulfilling their agenda.  It seems very similar to a scene in the coliseum, where the crowd would determine the fate of defeated gladiators.  The conventional political wisdom of the day was that when confronting the Roman authorities with a request or demand, it was best to do so with as large and boisterous a crowd as possible.  The lesson here is that far from having wisdom, crowds have agendas, and usually unbeknownst to the crowd itself, the agenda is being controlled by an extremely small group of people.  We are not liberated through crowds or the agendas of others that control such crowds, rather we are liberated by following in the footsteps of a single man, Jesus Christ, the one who died to redeem the very crowd which raged against him. 

A final point that can be gleaned from this passage, and perhaps the one that deserves the most emphasis, is that just like the two Jesus’, Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas, we get a fate we don’t deserve.  You see, imprisonment was not a common legal penalty in the Greco-Roman world, so any prisoner to be released was either awaiting trial, or had already been condemned and was awaiting sentencing.  This means Barabbas had more than likely either already been tried, or was awaiting sentencing.  We see this often in the life of the apostle Paul as we read of his career.  His imprisonment is usually a precursor to a trial, whether that trial is before a group of local officials, a proconsul, or the emperor himself.  When the Romans chose to grant amnesty, there were two forms in which it was given.  There was the abolitio, or acquittal of a prisoner not yet condemned.  And there was also the indulgentia, or the pardoning of one already condemned.   Jesus dies for the crimes of Barabbas, though he was innocent, while Barabbas is let free, though he is guilty.  If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, it should, for we could very easily substitute in any of our names in the place of Barabbas, and the sentence would hold just as much truth as it does in its current construction.  Jesus’ trial was more than a mere legal proceeding; it was the acting out of the divine drama of redemption, forgiveness, and grace.  To put it in Roman legal terms you’re now familiar with, by not receiving an abolitio, Jesus wins for us an indulgentia.