Introducing the special Lenten Readings

You might notice that our reading schedule for Lent has some readings that don't exactly follow the normal reading schedule.  These special readings have some significance for the historical Lenten season.  There are some readings on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday (February 25) which set the tone for the forty days.

• Jonah 3-4: The prophet Jonah travels to Ninevah to warn of their impending destruction in forty days.  The King of Ninevah responds by ordering that everyone fast and pray to God to prevent the disaster -- and it works.
• Hebrews 12:1-14: God does indeed invoke discipline, but only to those whom he loves and only for the greater good.
• Luke 18:9-14: Jesus illustrates that while fasting and obeying are good, it's all for naught without humility.
• Psalm 102: A special prayer for the occasion of being overwhelmed by some difficulty -- could this situation relate to something you're praying for during these 40 days?
• Psalm 130: Another plea for help from God.

There are also several readings for Holy Week, the week between Lent and the day of Easter Sunday.  These readings find lasting significance in the birth and resurrection of Jesus.  The readings from the book of John cover some of the story between Jesus' trial and death.  If you read carefully, you will spot a special connection between Zecharaiah 9:9-12 and John 12:9-19.  Zechariah predicts one of the circumstances of the anticipated king of Jerusalem, and in John, Jesus fulfills it.  Also, the readings from Philippians 3 and 4 bear some testament to power of the death of Jesus.  Can you spot other seasonal significance in the Holy Week readings?

Introducing the Psalms

The Psalms are the Bible’s model prayers.  About half of them are written by the famous king David, as well known as a musician and worshipper as he was as a warrior and giant-slayer.  There’s a psalm for almost every occasion we’re likely to experience in life.  In the Psalms, we find beautiful songs of praise, testimonies to God’s goodness, pleas for help, and questions asked when things don’t work out as they’re supposed to.  The Psalms are really meant to be prayed—sung even—rather than just read.  I find that I get the most out of them when I adopt them as my own, praying them as my own prayers.  I tend to pray them verbatim—doing so aloud and with gusto whenever possible seems to improve the experience immensely—but I know other people who use them as jumping off points into further prayer in their own words.  You might even want to try occasionally reading a psalm aloud together with someone else.  Take turns reading stanzas aloud.  At the end of the psalm—or in the middle of longer psalms—you could jump off-book to pray further about the ways the psalm connects to your own current life circumstances.

If you’re like me, praying two common types of psalms might initially make you a bit uncomfortable:

• Extravagant claims of righteousness—occasionally, I find myself gulping when, aloud and with gusto, I end up praying something like, ‘I have led a blameless life; I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered’ (Psalm 26:1).  I wonder if the proverbial lightning will strike me down.  Despite the fears of divine punishment, a few things have kept me praying these absurd boasts:
  • First of all, I’ve noticed that my praying of these psalms take on a tone of aspiration: it makes me want to be the kind of person who can pray those things without blushing.  That seems like a pretty good result to me.
  • Secondly, I get the feeling that the psalmist doesn’t mean that he has never made any mistakes.  I think what he’s saying is that he has never abandoned God.  That’s still a pretty gutsy thing to say, but it’s not quite a claim to perfection.  While the ‘not faltering’ thing still kind of trips me up, I think I can honestly say that ever since I met God I’ve taken my relationship with God seriously.
  • Thirdly, I have a growing suspicion that these extravagant claims to righteousness have less to do with my moral report card, as it were, and more to do with how God sees me.  I noticed that sometimes in the same psalm the author will ask for God’s forgiveness and will make one of these audacious claims to utter blamelessness.  Once he’s confessed and been forgiven, it’s as if he never even took a mis-step.  Perhaps these psalms are saying that, because of God’s goodness, we can be certain that God likes us, sees the best in us, and wants the best for us.  If that’s the case—and I’m beginning to believe it is—then we can pray those crazy things with confidence and excitement.
• Calls for violent retribution—some of the psalms seem like they’re more suited to a Quentin Tarantino movie than to the Bible.  While I sometimes still find myself a little squeamish at the sheer bloodthirstiness of some of these ‘crush my enemy’ psalms, I’ve been surprised to find them among the most helpful psalms to pray, for a few reasons:
  • They help me prepare for the difficulties of the day—if I start the day with one of these psalms, it reminds me that not everything is going to go my way.  I can prepare myself, and ask for God’s help in facing the difficulties that are sure to come;
  • It’s a faithful and non-violent way to vent—it’s extremely liberating to unabashedly express just how I feel about the people who treat me poorly and unfairly.  But in the end, it’s harmless.  I’m expressing it to God, not letting it leak out in my interactions with people.  I express my anger and my desire for revenge; then I leave it in God’s hands to protect me and to vindicate me when appropriate.  Once I’ve expressed my feelings and left action in God’s hands, I can much more easily let it go;
  • I primarily focus the prayers on my true enemies—the New Testament author Paul tells us that our real enemies aren’t other people, but destructive spiritual forces whose entire purpose is to do us harm (Ephesians 6:12).  I have no problem praying that these enemies die a gruesome death.

Like Isaiah from the Epiphany readings, Jeremiah was also an Old Testament prophet tasked with interpreting current events from God's perspective.   Jeremiah's prophesied in Judah from 626 B.C. through about 586.  During this time, the small nation of Judah was caught up in the military conquests of the larger empires of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt.  This period of stress for Judah led Jeremiah's prophecies to have a morose edge to them.  The anguish that he expresses has led him to be known as "the weeping prophet".

Reading Jeremiah can be difficult because of his forecful declaration of God's judgement on his fellow countrymen.  Why the harsh judgement on Judah?  Prior to Jeremiah, Judah was corrupted under the long reign king Manassah.  Manasseh essentially led Judah to seek power from sources other than God, which is known as idolatry throughout the Bible.  Attempts at reforms by subsequent kings did little to change this.  Jeremiah interpreted Babylon's violence against Judah as the consenquence for their actions.  Despite Jeremiah's seemingly harsh words, he loved Judah and was always careful to point out that a sincere return to God from idolatry would help their situation.  Jeremiah is a complex character!  How might you go about taking his point of view on the affairs of Judah?

Introducing Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy is basically Moses’ farewell address.  He is quite an old man; he has outlived his entire generation, but now he is about to die himself.  The Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land, but God has let them know that it will be Joshua (Moses’ protégé) who will lead them there, not Moses.  Before he dies, Moses gives a long speech in which he reminds this new generation of the entire history of their parents’ generation and gives his final advice on what they can learn from that history.  Featured in the portion of Deuteronomy for Lent this year are a recitation of the Ten Commandments and exhortations to love and remember God for all he's done.

Our New Testament readings start out with the first five chapters of Hewbrews.  This book is unusual in that we don't really know who the author was, but know it was not Paul, the author of most of the other letters in the New Testament.  Hebrews doesn't exactly follow the pattern of a typical letter, either.  It's clear, however, that Hebrews was written primarily to new follows of Jesus of Jewish heritage who were familiar with the Old Testament.  The author makes a sustained case that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament predicted and looked forward to.

In the five chapters that we're reading this season, you'll see the author show the supremacy of Jesus over angels and over Moses, both of great importance in the Old Testament and to the Jews.  Yet you'll also see a distinct declaration of the humanity of Jesus and his commonality with all other people.  This is apparently a huge contradiction!  How can Jesus have both qualities of the divine and the mundane?  And what exactly does Jesus fulfill as far as the Old Testament is concerned?  These are the questions that the Jewish recipients may have dealt with as they began to grapple with the contents of the letter.

The other major part of our New Testament readings for Lent is the first third of the book of Romans.  Romans is a letter from Paul, one of the church’s early leaders, to the church in Rome.  Paul was the person primarily responsible for spreading Jesus’ message beyond the Jewish populations in or near Judea.  He was especially instrumental in starting churches in what are now Turkey and Greece.

Most of Paul’s letters were written to churches he himself founded, but this letter to the Romans is instead a letter of introduction to a place where he’s never been.  Apparently, from his list of greetings at the end of the book, Paul has several friends who have over time made their way to Rome.  But he himself has not been there and is somewhat unknown to most of the church.  He is planning a visit, but before he arrives he feels the need to write this letter to lay out his beliefs about Jesus; apparently, some alarming misunderstandings of Paul’s message have reached the Romans.

In Romans, Paul pays a lot of attention to addressing what was a pretty major area of concern for the early church: the place of Judaism in following Jesus.  As increasing numbers of non-Jews (often called ‘gentiles’ in the Bible—gentile is an Anglicization of the Greek for ‘the nations’) became followers of Jesus, it brought up the question of what their relationship to Judaism was supposed to be.  Did Gentiles need to become Jews to be followers of Jesus?  If not, what relevance did the Old Testament have for these Gentile Jesus-followers?  And if non-Jews could become followers of Jesus, what did that mean about God’s previously unique relationship with the Jews?  It was a surprisingly thorny issue because it involved issues of culture, deep theology about the goodness of God and the reliability of his promises, and very practical questions of everyday living.  While the specific issue of non-Jews following Jesus is certainly less of a big deal nowadays, the big questions behind the issue—of culture, dealing with difference, how rules help us and hurt us, and the nature of God’s promises—all still seem pretty relevant.   During this particular part of the reading schedule, we pick up Paul’s rather complicated argument about Jews and Gentiles in the middle.  If you’re just starting the reading schedule, you might need to give it a little time to get into the swing of the letter, or you could catch yourself up by looking back at the first five chapters.

As we read these passages, it’s helpful to keep in mind that we are, in fact, reading someone else’s letters.  Paul didn’t know that we’d be reading these letters.  Because he has a specific audience in mind, Paul can make some pretty solid assumptions about things that they already know; so, there are many things Paul doesn’t bother to say.  Instead, he uses the letters to address specific occasions, questions, or concerns.  Since we’re only reading Paul’s half of what were probably exchanges of correspondence, we need to do a little bit of inference to figure out the situation or question to which Paul is responding.  It’s sort of like overhearing one half of a phone conversation; it can sometimes be a little confusing or mysterious, but with a little work you can mostly get a pretty good idea of what the other people have said based on Paul’s responses to them.

In applying the lessons of this letter to our lives, it’s helpful to continually keep in mind that Paul is writing to specific groups of people with specific questions and concerns.  It’s not always possible or beneficial to apply Paul’s instructions without some interpretation.  Our culture and our concerns can be quite different from those of the ancient Romans.  In the effort to figure out how I can make use of Paul’s advice to someone else, I find a good sequence of questions is,

• What problem or question is Paul addressing?
• What is his answer to his audience?
• What’s the general principle behind his answer?
• Are there circumstances in my life where that principle would apply?
• What would it look like for me to take Paul’s advice?

Particularly when Paul is saying something confusing, troubling, or even offensive to me—often because of cultural differences between Paul and me—I find it extremely helpful to toss around this list of questions with a friend, or a group of friends, to see if together we can find out what value Paul’s advice has for us.

The book of John is the last of the four gospels.  Authorship is traditionally credited to John, one of Jesus’ twelve closest followers, known as the apostles (the ‘sent ones’).  He refers to himself in the gospel as ‘the disciple Jesus loved.’  This is probably both a mark of humility—not wanting to refer to himself by name—and of the deep affection that he felt from Jesus and for Jesus.  The book is dated at 70 AD which means that it was written later in John's life, about 30 years after Jesus died and later than the other three gospels.

John's perspective on the life of Jesus is notably different from those of the other three gospels (called the ‘synoptics’—Greek for ‘seen together’—gospels).  There are some differences in the timeline of events, for example the duration of Jesus' ministry, the overlapping of his ministry with John the Baptist, and the number of trips he made to Jerusalem.  In the synoptic gospels, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, but in John, Jesus identifies himself for arrest.  Only John contains the stories of turning water to wine at a wedding and the resurrection of Lazarus.  John's gospel contains more monologue and dialogue from Jesus with fewer miracles.  The miracles he performs in John are perceived less as demonstrations of power and more as signs of things to come; in other words, the symbolic meaning of the miracles is given more prominence in John’s gospels than in the others.

The gospel of John's differences with the synoptic gospels raises several questions.  Is John mistaken on some points?  Can we reconcile the differences?  I think of it in the same way that two different writers can write a biography of the same person, ending up with two different but complementary stories.  For example, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wife Eleanor were to write a biography of FDR, she might focus on his family life during the World War II and the Great Depression.  His activity as the 32nd president of the United States would certainly play a role in that, but perhaps not as much as if Harry Truman (his last vice president and 33rd president) was writing the biography.  Truman would probably take a much more politically-oriented approach to FDR's life and leave out most of the details of his family.

John's close friendship with Jesus gives us a very special perspective of Jesus.  More than the other gospels, we see a Jesus that loves deeply and encourages everyone to love each other as well.  We also see that Jesus stresses the value of something called ‘eternal life’ and that it can be experienced right now.  Jesus also communicates the true nature of his miracle—they are signs of good things to come and proof of his divine nature.

As you read John, take note of the unusual way in which he dialogues with.  He speaks of being ‘born again’ in a way that is disturbing to Nicodemus.  He calls himself the ‘living bread’ and he offers a Samaritan woman ‘living water,’ both of which he says give eternal life.  Why do you think Jesus seems to be intentionally confusing in his dialogue?  What do you find appealing or troubling about Jesus' view of eternal life?