A sermon on Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149 & Matthew 18:15-20 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Come with me for a few minutes, and let’s imagine our way into the experience of a Hebrew household on the night of the first Passover, the night we heard about in our first reading from the book of Exodus.
During a time of increasing chaos and oppression in the land of slavery, we have received instructions from Moses and Aaron to sacrifice a lamb tonight and eat a special meal and paint blood around the doors of our houses. They told us that a curse will fall on the land, that something is going to pass through the land tonight killing people and animals right, left and centre. Only those who do the sacrifice and paint their door frames right will be spared.
So here we are, huddled in our houses in the dead of night, knowing that a mysterious something is moving through the land outside our locked doors, leaving death in its wake. Death and more death. And all through that anxious night, we wonder whether we did the sacrifice and the door painting right, and whether Moses and Aaron knew what they were talking about when they said that would save us. Will we really be safe in the morning?
I’m sorry if that has triggered flashbacks of the first covid lockdowns where we were all being told what to do to stay safe, and it was obvious to everyone that not even the scientists knew quite what it was that was moving through the land leaving a trail of death, and the initial instructions on how to keep safe were little more than educated guesses. Would we really be safe in the morning?
There has been a lot of grief and loss in and around our congregation recently. It is not quite 16 months since William and then Sylvia died. Then we lost Margie just over six weeks ago. This past week several of us have attended funerals for friends, including the big one on Friday for Simon Holt, the much loved former pastor and teacher, who touched many of our lives and who died only three days after being diagnosed with leukaemia. And in among all those there have been other funerals and other loved ones receiving diagnoses or being gradually lost to dementia or other degenerative illnesses, and grief over the threats to the Earth. It feels a bit like a dangerous something is moving through the land outside our doors. Will we be safe in the morning?
Now that little exercise of imagining our way into the experience of that first Passover night might capture something of the uncertainty and anxiety of our recent shared experiences, but when we dig into this Passover story a bit deeper, past the feel and into what it actually claims, the connection with our experience begins to fall apart or become very very problematic.
You see, although we might have got it right in imagining that those Hebrew slaves that night would have been very uncertain and anxious about whether the promised protection would work, the story expresses absolute certainty that it did. It says that every single household with the ritual blood on the doorframes was spared, and every single household without it lost one of their loved ones to the mysterious deadly thing that moved through the land.
There is no uncertainty or doubt expressed – the killing was God’s doing, God provided a guaranteed method of exemption for his chosen people, and it all worked perfectly, just as God had ordained. There was nothing at all random about the wave of death and loss that night. It was all under God’s control. Those who obeyed God were safe, guaranteed. That’s how the story tells it.
And that certainty so does not map onto our recent experiences, does it? In fact, I’d call it something of a jarring collision with our recent experiences. So much of the death and decline we have been encountering has seemed frighteningly random and inexplicable.
I mean, in some cases we can perhaps identify this or that that might have contributed in some way. Sylvia was always better at taking care of other people’s health than she was of her own. William had always been a bit reckless about his own safety and wellbeing. But even so, it might have only taken one less duck to line up and they’d still be with us. And so many of the others seem utterly random.
Margie was busily preparing for a long planned overseas trip with Jeff, and then in a matter of weeks cancer had taken her. And her rapid decline seemed horrifyingly fast until last week when Simon Holt had only three days between falling ill and dying. Three days! My mind is reeling from that. Somehow it feels like if he had died of a heart attack or in a car accident I could have processed that more easily. My mind has a category for sudden unforeseen deaths like that. But cancer doesn’t fit in that category. You are supposed to get months of warning and preparing. Not three days.
Last year when Simon finished his sixteen years as pastor of Collins Street Baptist, his colleague Carolyn Francis said from the pulpit that the question she was asked more than any other about working with Simon was whether he was really as good, as kind, as generous, as gracious as he appeared. Her comment at the time was that the question reflected the cynicism of our age – we have wearily grown to assume that apparent goodness must be concealing something darker and more twisted. But this week that same question is just a reminder that even the very best of us can be struck down without warning by some utterly random illness. Being a person of deep faith and exemplary kindness does not mark you out as safe from mysterious forces of death that pass through the land.
We too want a formula like the one given to the Hebrew slaves. Do this sacrifice, paint this blood on your doorframes, and you will be protected. Guaranteed. But our experience is not offering us any such thing.
We want that formula, because the more fragile and unsafe things feel, the more desperately we look for some form of control, some way to defeat the randomness and take charge of our own destiny. And there’s a risk that our anxiety will drive us to take matters into our own hands. Did you hear that as we sang Psalm 149 before? With no mark on their doors to keep them safe, a later generation now “glories” in taking up the sword “to execute vengeance on the nations.” We will keep ourselves safe that way, and tell ourselves we are doing God’s work.
But this certainty that random dangers can be controlled by either ritual purity or sacred violence is not without its critics, even within the Bible. And as Jesus reminded us in tonight’s gospel reading, there is a Biblical tradition that says that if a matter is in dispute, a single witness is not enough. Call and listen to two or three others.
The Bible, as always, is a conversation. It repeatedly gives us two or more sides of any given argument, not to confuse us, but to invite us into the conversation, into the discernment, so that we can learn to listen with humility to the various strands and learn how to faithfully unravel them and make healthy judgements in our own contexts.
This question we are asking tonight taps into one of the biggest long-running debates in the Bible. Is life fair? Is God controlling everything? Does illness, disaster or defeat only fall on those who deserve it, and can we therefore conclude that those things are evidence of people’s sin? We’d like it to be that way, because then we would know how to keep ourselves safe – put our faith in God, follow the commandments, paint blood on our doorframes if that’s what we are told to do. But is it like that?
Tonight’s reading from Exodus said yes, but when we call on other witnesses within the Bible, we hear a counter-view. No it’s not like that, says Job. No it’s not like that, says Isaiah in the servant songs. No it’s not like that, say many of the psalms of lament. No it’s not like that, says the account of the mistrial and execution of Jesus. Life is often not fair, and even the best and most faithful of us can fall victim to illness or accident or injustice.
Job is perhaps our clearest early witness, because the whole book of Job is essentially a protest against this view that suffering can always be explained. Job comes under sustained pressure from his friends to accept that his suffering proved his guilt, but he wouldn’t budge. He protests, and protests, and when he runs out of words and out of tears, he just sits in prolonged agonising silence. There is nothing more to say. His suffering and grief remain unexplained. There is no theory and no formula that can either explain it or grant immunity from it.
It remains as random and inexplicable as a three-day cancer death, and all Job can do and all any of us can do is collapse into silent anguish. The servant songs of Isaiah back him up. The psalms of lament back him up. The biblical witnesses have not so much spoken, as sat in silent solidarity.
This biblical protest begins long before Jesus, but we see it particularly clearly in Jesus. He did on occasion engage with it in theory as a question – “Do you think these people who died when the tower collapsed were worse sinners than anyone else? No, they weren’t.” (Luke 13:1-5) But the answer we see in Jesus is a lived response, not a position statement.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t die through a random illness. He dies in an act of political violence. And weirdly, given what we heard him say tonight about the need to seek additional witnesses to guard against injustice, Jesus is condemned when that system is deliberately corrupted, and a procession of false witnesses lie about him under oath. But despite the very different mechanism that leads to his death, the same questions remain unanswerable. How is this fair? What could have provided sure protection against this? How does this make sense?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There’s no answer.
But no answer doesn’t mean there is no response. When we are looking for an answer to our questions, we are looking for an explanation, a way of making sense of it all, and perhaps a formula to give us some control, some protection, some immunity. A formula like “Believe. Confess. Do the ritual. Paint the blood on your door. And all will be well. Guaranteed.”
What we see writ large in the Jesus story is, as Job and Isaiah and some of the psalms had been trying to say, that God’s response to undeserved suffering and illness and death was never going to be an explanation or a formula. When there is no answer, no explanation, and no formula, God is nevertheless responding. God is nevertheless there, here, right here.
God is here with us in our multiple griefs, over people, relationships, health, places and creatures. God is here with us in our unanswered questions, in our anguished silence. God, who we have seen most fully in Jesus, is here, not explaining our tears, but crying them with us; not guaranteeing some supernatural immunity, but standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the face of whatever is coming our way.
Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but I think it bears telling again. It is part of my own story.
Many years ago, a big grief and loss shattered my faith. I can see now that my faith had not so much been in Jesus, but in some formulas about Jesus, and those formulas were things I was sure meant that this loss I was experiencing was not supposed to happen. I had done the right things, obeyed God. God should protect me. But God hadn’t protected me.
Somewhat like Job, I spent weeks shouting angry obscenities at God for letting me down and giving no answers. I was so angry, and so broken. And I shouted my anger at God until I ran out of steam and ran out of words. And when that happened I just slumped on the floor of my room, with no more words, and cried and sobbed and wailed.
And as I sat there slumped against that wall with the tears pouring down my face, I had what I guess is called a vision – a picture in my imagination that felt quite real at the time. I saw Jesus walk into the room. He didn’t reel off answers to the questions I had yelled. He didn’t tell me off for yelling at God. He didn’t say anything. He just sat down beside me on that floor and put an arm around my shoulders and burst into tears with me. That’s all. No convoluted answers. Just shared tears.
Not one of my questions got answered with explanations or new formulas. But somehow I no longer needed answers. The questions no longer seemed important. Jesus was with me, sharing my grief, sharing my tears, and that was all that mattered. It changed my life.
In all that’s been going on in and around our congregation recently, and in and around our world, Jesus is with us, sharing our grief, sharing our tears. Sitting with us, an arm around our shoulders and tears streaming down his cheeks. Jesus is with us, really with us.