INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

Year C - First Sunday of Lent

 

DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11.   The offering of the first fruits of the harvest was one of the great festivals in Israel's temple ritual. Though the story and the liturgy probably developed much later, in this passage Moses is said to have initiated the ritual as a commandment from God. The story lifts up the fundamental concept of stewardship: offering to God the first returns of our labour as an act of worship and thanksgiving, and as a symbol of the  dedication of ourselves and all our possessions to God.

 

PSALM 91:1-2, 9-16.     This psalm proclaims the traditional faith that total dependence on God brings providential protection from evil. God does this graciously and mercifully because it is God's nature to do so, not as a reward for good behaviour.

 

ROMANS 10:8b-13.    Paul struggles to explain how both Jews and Gentiles can have a right relationship with God. For Jews it was by keeping of the commandments of God given through Moses. But that can only be done by faith in the lordship of Jesus Christ, Paul says to the Romans. Nothing else will suffice for either Jews or Gentiles.

 

LUKE 4:1-13.  Immediately after his baptism, the Spirit led him into the wilderness for a time of prayer and fasting. The so-called temptations came to Jesus as inner reflections about how to do what he now perceived his divine mission to be. He could have chosen any of the three tempting ways: to satisfy his own needs by feeding himself and the crowds immediately; to gain supreme power by subjecting himself to evil; or to draw attention to himself by some spectacular performance. He rejected all three. His struggles with temptation had not ended. More were yet to come as he chose the way that led to the cross.

 

 

A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS.

 

DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11.   The offering of the first fruits of the harvest was one of the great festivals in Israel's temple ritual. As with most ancient festivals, the practice of dedicating the first sheaf of grain to be harvested to Yahweh had much earlier origins in the agricultural practices adopted by the Israelites when they left their pastoral life in the wilderness and settled down among the Canaanites..

 


An ancient taboo lay behind the offering, rooted in the concept of divine property rights. All created beings of any kind belonged to the deity and were therefore regarded as holy. Ps. 24:1 gives this concept explicit expression. Before being consumed by humans, all produce had to be "redeemed" for profane use. If this was not done, divine justice entailed retribution. The only way to resolve this problem was to give back to the deity the first part of the tabooed object, thus nullifying the deity's prior property rights. Thus ancient Israelites dedicated the first fruits of the harvest to Yahweh. They similarly dedicated their first-born animals and gave special place of honour to their

first-born sons.

 

Though the liturgical celebration of this festival probably developed much later, in this passage Moses is said to have initiated the ritual as a commandment from Yahweh. This passage is part of a major section of Deuteronomy (chs. 12-26) written as if Moses delivered the law on almost all aspects of the covenanted nation's life as revealed by Yahweh on Sinai. It is an imaginative reconstruction dating from the late 7th century at the earliest, possibly six or seven hundred years after the assumed time of Moses.

 

For us, the passage lifts up the fundamental concept of stewardship: offering to God the first returns of our labour, now usually measured in monetary terms, as an act of worship and thanksgiving, and as a symbol of the dedication of ourselves and all our possessions to God. However we may make the dedication - by an offering presented during worship or by a pre-authorized remittance from our bank accounts - the meaning is the same. By this sacramental act, we are committing ourselves to live in God's way. The temptation we all face is to short-change God by neglecting to make an offering commensurate with our means.

 

Another aspect of this sacred stewardship is gaining more and more popularity in the developed nations. Environmental stewardship means that we must make use of the gifts of God in the natural world for the benefit of all, but not abuse them only for personal consumption and so destroy the quality of life for all on this planet. Our greatest challenge is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels to satisfy our profligate habits. This is particularly difficult for us who have lived so long as if we are the dominant creatures to whom all nature is to be subjugated for our benefit (Gen. 1:29-30). With global warming causing great changes to the planet’s natural, interdependent systems, this is the time for us to reconsider our role and adopt a stringent stewardship of the planet’s resources as the only means to bring about a more balanced future for all humanity and our planet. Lent is a good time to begin practicing these personal disciplines as our part in environmental stewardship.

 

 


PSALM 91:1-2, 9-16. This psalm proclaims Israel's traditional faith that total dependence on Yahweh brought providential protection from all evil. It may be claimed that the psalmist has little or no awareness of the complexity of the problem of evil. The perils of living in an imperfect world do not seem to worry him or detract from his absolute trust. This recalls Ps. 46 as a similar confession of trust.

 

The first two verses create some interesting images. Was the psalmist, possibly a Levite whose duty kept him close to the temple precincts, taking shelter from the blazing midsummer sun in the shadow of the temple? The massive structure communicated something of the mysterious omnipotence that so dominated the Israelite concept of the deity.

 

The word translated Almighty in vs. 2 also conjures up some ancient concepts of the divine being. The Hebrew word is shaddai, a name for Israel's deity supposedly dating from the patriarchal period more than a thousand years before the 6th century BCE priestly document of the Pentateuch used it almost exclusively. The name referred to a mountain deity whose typical theophany was in a storm. The power of this god was not manifested in nature, but by protecting the family or tribe, upholding its social life and guiding its historical pilgrimage tot he Promised Land. This is the intent of its use in the context of this psalm. The name El Shaddai also appeared extensively in the Book of Job where it expressed the omnipotent majesty of deity, not surprising because that book probably also dates from the 6th century BCE or a little later.

 

It would appear that the psalm was chosen for the first Sunday of Lent because vss. 11-12 are quoted by Satan in tempting Jesus in Matthew 4:6 and Luke 4:10-11. On the other hand, we should interpret the devoutly expressed trust metaphorically rather than literally as Satan did. Jesus replied in such a way as to deflect such a literal interpretation by quoting another scripture text from Deuteronomy 6:16. Scripture texts so quoted may easily contradict one another.

 

The concluding vss. 14-16 give a different bent to the psalmist's trust. The basis for it lies in the covenant love between Yahweh and Israel which extends to each individual Israelite. The RSV and NEB convey this better than the NRSV: "Because his love is set on me, I will deliver him; I will lift him beyond danger, for he knows me by my name." (NEB) El Shaddai does this graciously and mercifully because it is his nature to do so, and it is in fulfillment of the covenant, not a reward for good behaviour.

 

 


ROMANS 10:8b-13.  This passage belongs to one of the major segments of Paul's letter - chs. 9-11 - in which he struggled to explain how both Jews and Gentiles can have a right relationship with God through faith alone. His audience would appear to have been a predominantly Jewish community in Rome, so he was at pains to clarify the reasons for his Gentile mission and his attitude to the rejection of the gospel by many of his fellow Jews. In his classic Moffat New Testament Commentary (1932),  C.H. Dodd suggested that this section may even have stood alone, perhaps as a sermon, which Paul incorporated into his letter. If so, what a sermon!

 

For Jews, Paul claimed, their relationship with God depended on keeping of the commandments of God given through Moses. He condemned his fellow Jews for their unenlightened ways. They had chosen a good end - relationship with God - but pursued it by the wrong means. He went on to claim that a true relationship with God could only be attained through faith in the lordship of Jesus Christ.  Nothing else would suffice for either Jews or Gentiles.

 

All through his Letter to the Romans, Paul quoted rather freely and literally (perhaps from memory) from the Greek Septuagint version of the Jewish scriptures. He was not much concerned, however, with the context of the passages he quotes. Vss. 6-8 refers to Deuteronomy 30:11-14. He simply tried to say that salvation in Christ is available to all and cannot be achieved by human effort. In vs. 11, he quoted from Isaiah 28:16; and in vs. 13 from Joel 2:32. His purpose was establish that Jesus is Lord and to reassure his predominantly Jewish audience that the sovereignty of Christ is not only effective for Jews and Gentiles alike, but was prefigured in the Jewish scriptures.

 

Thus Paul, a scholarly young rabbi before his conversion, pled his case before fellow Jews by drawing extensively on the sacred literature of his people. A glance at chs. 9-11 in the NSRV shows many of the quotations in poetic style and stand out on the pages. The quotation from Joel in vs. 13 refers to the Jewish conviction that when the end of the world came, those who called on the name of the Lord (i.e. Yahweh) would find safety in the kingdom of the Messiah. Paul merely transposed this verse to convince his now Judaeo-Christian audience as to how safe they were in accepting the fundamental creed that Jesus is Lord.

 

 


LUKE 4:1-13.    This passage takes us back to the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. Yet it was not the report of a single incident. S. MacLean Gilmour said “a commentary on the entire course of Jesus' ministry.”  Jesus must often have been tempted to prove the authenticity of his mission by displaying  miraculous powers and undertaking the role of a political Messiah.  (The Interpreter's Bible, viii, 83).

 

The issue of power and how Jesus was to use it runs through the whole of the gospel story. His healing miracles were social dynamite to the astonished multitudes. They were an immediate threat to the religious authorities in Galilee, but especially in Judea and Jerusalem. Jesus constantly had to face the question of when and how to use the power of God in him. He became conscious of that power through the infusion of the Spirit at his baptism.

 

Immediately after his baptism, he retreated into the wilderness for a time of prayer and fasting. The so-called "temptations" came as a time of deep inner reflection about his baptismal experience and how to do what he now perceived his divine mission to be. All three gospels assert that it was the Spirit and not Satan which motivated him to withdraw for this time of contemplation.

 

But what exactly was this experience? Did it result from the intensely emotional spiritual insight of his baptism in which he totally and compassionately identified himself with the common folk despite being aware of his divine nature and mission? Was he hallucinating because of his lack of food and water? Had he discovered in a flash of insight that the root of the world's suffering lies in the misuse of power?

 

Who but Jesus could have told the disciples and their successors in the Apostolic Church about his experience and its meaning for his ministry? Could this have been one of the things he told them after the resurrection? Or, could this be the gospel authors' reflection on who this strange person in their midst really was and what his arrival in their Galilean villages meant for them and for future generations of believers?

 

Jesus - and by implication, the church which still represents him in the world - could have chosen any of the three tempting ways to tell what the story of his life, death and resurrection is really all about. First, he could satisfy his own needs by feeding  himself, thus immediately negating the very essence of his message to love God and others in every possible way. After all, human institutions exist because in some way or another they meet the needs of those who create them. The church is no exception as its attention to property and worldly possessions so obviously demonstrates.

 


Secondly, he had a choice of gaining immediate and supreme power by subjecting himself to the forces of evil. All through history, this has been the choice of the politically and economically powerful, as the devastating wars of the last century manifested so clearly. All too frequently the church has aided and abetted this power-seeking urge.

 

Jesus' third option would draw attention to himself by a spectacular theatrical performance. How could anyone fail to recognize who he was if he did this? He rejected all three options. Or did he? It never ceases to amaze me that time and again, Jesus' miraculous healings and other acts of mercy did exactly what the third temptation indicated he should not do. Perhaps it was just the way the gospels tell the story and the way the later kerygma of the apostolic church focused attention on this strange person. Nonetheless, the biblical narrative places him at its very centre and asks the eternal question, "Who do you say that I am?"

 

Nor were Jesus' internal struggles ended with this incident so briefly reported by Luke. Many more were yet to come as he chose the way that led to his death by crucifixion in a relatively short time. His message that the kingdom of God was at hand, indeed had already arrived with him, continually created the problem of distinguishing between personal opportunism and the radically new ways he proposed to bring God's sovereign love into all human relationships.

 

Christian history through the centuries demonstrates how much his followers failed to live up to his real intent. Sadly, we have not rejected the various options of continuing Jesus' ministry in and to the world. This point needs to be made again and again in every community of faith. Meeting our own needs, the desire for and rewards of power have continually prevented us from doing as he did in laying down his life for those whom he loves.

 

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