Our Job Description

In preparation this morning for a Bible study I teach to a group of seniors each Thursday, I pondered the Mass readings for yesterday (March 13). It is, I think, serendipitous, that I am currently leading my study group through the third chapter of Philippians – so the Mass readings caught my attention. They (and our priest’s comments) gave me additional ideas for this Thursday’s discussion.

The Old Testament reading was from Isaiah 43. Unfortunately, the few verses of the particular reading (verses 16-21) do not fully illuminate the wonderful promise God makes to His people in the entire chapter. I hope you will take the time to read it on your own, if you haven’t already done so.

For the sake of space, I am pasting below what I consider the salient points of the reading in Isaiah. (Again, even what I have pasted below does not fully illustrate God’s wonderful mercy. Please take the time to read the entire chapter):

Isaiah 43:1-19: “But now, thus says the LORD, your Creator, O Jacob, and He who formed you, O Israel, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine! “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, Nor will the flame burn you. “For I am the LORD your God . . . Thus says the LORD, “Do not call to mind the former things, Or ponder things of the past. “Behold, I will do something new . . . “I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, And I will not remember your sins.”

This section from Isaiah spoke to me again, even now, as I reread it in conjunction with the two other Mass readings. First, St. Paul’s comment in Philippians 3: "Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."
 
And then the Lord’s response to the woman caught in adultery. Here is part of that text in John 8: “Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

I see in these readings a critically important point – a point fundamental to our ability to grow closer to God: When we have brought our sins to God in humble repentance, we must afterward do two things:

1. Forget them and forever leave them in our past, under the blood of Jesus.
2. Determine to not do again whatever it was we did. (If we stumble again over the same sin, we repeat the same process of confession – see 1 John 1:8-10).

The devil will always be quick to park on our shoulder and whisper accusations in our ear. But such should not surprise us. That is his job-description as the Father of Lies (John 8:44) who always accuses God’s children (Revelation 12:10).

But our job description is also clear: God wants us to forget what is past and now covered by the blood of the Savior. And we are to press forward toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Brethren, let’s now be about doing what God has called us to do to win the lost.

Thirsty? Come and Drink

The Last Seven Statements of Jesus

His Fifth Word

“I am thirsty.”  (John 19:28)

It started in the Garden. The savior prayed with such anguish, His sweat mingled with His blood and dripped to the ground. It was in the Garden that soldiers beat Him with their fists, pulled His beard, spit in His face. Then they dragged Him into the city and shuffled Him from Pilate to Herod, and back again to Pilate. They whipped Him without mercy, hardly giving Him time to catch His breath. Then they pressed a crown of thorns into His forehead. Blood oozed into His eyes and tracked down His cheeks. Mocking soldiers then laid the cross across His shoulders and forced Him to carry it to the where He would die.

“I am thirsty.”  

As Jesus groaned through parched lips, someone dipped a sponge in vinegar mixed with gall and brought it to His mouth (Matthew 27:34). The vinegar they offered Jesus was weak wine commonly used in Palestine to quench thirst. Gall was a bitter liquid with narcotic and anesthetic properties. Soldiers often gave it to prisoners about to be crucified as a way to dull their senses so they wouldn’t fight against the nails being hammered into their limbs. Sometimes friends gave it to those hanging on the cross to lessen their agony.

When Jesus tasted the gall He turned away. He would not drink the drug. He would finish the Father’s plan to its fullest course and its fullest cost. A short while later, someone gave Him the plain vinegar.

“I am thirsty.”

Although nailed to the cross, Jesus was the Lord of Heaven. The King of the Universe. He never needed to thirst. Or hunger. Or suffer pain. Yet He demonstrated by His life and by His death a ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness.’ Even on the cross, He would accomplish His Father’s will. That is why His death – and His thirst – serves as an illustration for us.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote, "God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

Restlessness. Thirst.

We who belong to Christ through our faith and baptism “have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer [we] who live, but Christ lives in [us]” (Galatians 2:20). When the Holy Spirit enters our lives He always creates within us a restlessness for God. A hunger for God. A thirst for God. If we are not restless for God, if we do not increasingly hunger and thirst for Him, we ought to wonder why.

“I am thirsty.”

You may remember another time Jesus was thirsty. I bring it to our attention now because it speaks to this whole point of thirsting for righteousness. You’ll find the familiar passage in John 4: There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” . . . . Therefore the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?”

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” . . . .“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again;  . . . but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”  

He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’;  for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.” (John 4:7ff)

Living water.

Jesus told her to go bring her husband, and she answered, “I have no husband.”  Of course Jesus knew of her sins. We cannot lie to the Lord. That is why He told her, “You have had five bed partners, and the one you now have is not your husband.” 

At first, many things seem to quench our spiritual thirst, but in the end they serve simply to anesthetize us to that thirst.  One of the lessons in this passage about the Samaritan woman is that her harlotry anesthetized her against knowing of God’s thirst-quenching fountain. And in the same way, our sins can dull us to that same fountain. 

Here is what the Holy Spirit tells us through the prophet Hosea (4:12):  Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the understanding . . . For a spirit of harlotry has led them astray, And they have played the harlot, departing from their God.

Hosea continues in chapter 5:  ⁴ Their deeds will not allow them to return to their God. For a spirit of harlotry is within them, and they do not know the Lord.

St. John spoke of counterfeit thirst-quenchers as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life” (1 John 2:16). But everyone reading this knows in the heart of hearts that counterfeits can never fully satisfy. The only place to quench our God-induced thirst, our God-induced restlessness, is at His fountain, devoting ourselves to the daily and lifelong drinking from His fountain by confession, reception of the Sacraments, daily prayer, Scripture study, and humble obedience to the Holy Spirit.

“I am thirsty.”

Have we become anesthetized to God by our sins? Have we drunk from the fountain of worldly pleasures, ideas, and philosophies? There is only one method of escape, to be free to know the thirst-quenching life of God: Come to Jesus, humbly and penitent – and then drink from His fountain.

Oh, Lord! Please, please, give us a holy thirst that ever draws us to the fountain of living water!  

Why Have You Forsaken Me?

The last seven words (statements, actually) of Jesus as He hung on Golgotha's cross are among the most encouraging of all Scripture. Here is the fourth of the seven:

The Other Side of the Door

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)

As our home Bible study wound to a close, a young mother ran out to her car for a package she’d forgotten. She left her two-year-old daughter with half a dozen adults in the living room. But when Berea saw Mommy leave, her face froze with panic. She ran as quickly as her little legs could carry her and stretched in vain for the doorknob. Her screams brimmed with terror, as if she believed Mommy would never to return from the other side of the door.

One of the other women lifted Berea into her arms and tried to calm her. But it was no use. The toddler wanted no one but Mommy. And mommy was gone.

A few moments later, Berea’s mother returned. When she opened the door she lifted Berea into her arms, rubbed her back and spoke tenderly into her ear. The child quickly quieted down. Mommy had returned.

Some theorize Jesus cried out, My God, My God, why have your forsaken Me?, only to draw attention to Psalm 22 in which the psalmist prophesied of Christ’s crucifixion nearly a thousand years before it happened (see Psalm 22:11-18). When Jesus quoted the first line of the psalm, they say, it was to demonstrate His fulfillment of that prophecy.

I think there was a far more significant reason for His outcry.

St. Luke tells us that while Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, imploring the Father to take the cup He was about to drink from His hands, Jesus’ sweat ‘became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44) . Bloody sweat is a rare, but well-documented physical phenomena called hematidrosis. It is known to occur in some people suffering extreme stress. Jesus dreaded the crucifixion not only because of the physical pain He’d suffer, but He also knew what it would mean when He took upon Himself the sins of the world. The prophet Isaiah is only one of many Old Testament prophets to speak about the results of sin: But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear (Isaiah 59:2).  

Separation.  From God.  

The Holy Spirit says this about Jesus: “Though He was in the form of God . . . . [He] emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-7).  And so, being fully God and fully Man, Jesus experienced all the frailty of humanity – hunger, thirst, pain, cold, heat . . . . And now He was about to experience in our place what He in His deity could never experience.

Separation from the Father.

St. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: [The Father] made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).  And in his letter to the church at Galatia, he added: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13).

As the most holy Lord Jesus hung between heaven and earth, He did not simply take our collective sins on Himself, but actually became Sin – became Sin – so you and I who are ‘in Christ,” you and I who trust Him as our redeemer, our reconciler, our savior, could become the very righteousness of God. 

Oh! Think of it!

Jesus, who knew the incomprehensible intimacy of the Triune Godhead, for the first time in eternity was separated from His Father. For that one moment – oh, but for the eternal God that moment must have seemed forever – for that one moment the Father turned away from Him who had become Sin.

No wonder He cried out, My God, My God. Why have You forsaken Me!, for in some mysterious and inexplicable way known only to the Holy Trinity, Jesus was suddenly on the other side of the door. Suddenly separated from His Father. Suddenly alone.

That is the fathomless horror our sin caused Him. And that is also the unquestionable evidence of the matchless love the Son has for the sinner –you and me – so we would not have to live forever separated from God, on the other side of the eternal door.

Thank you. Oh! Thank you, Jesus.

Father of mercy, like the prodigal son I return to You and say: "I have sinned against you and am no longer worthy to be called your son." Christ Jesus, Savior of the world, I pray with the repentant thief to whom You promised Paradise: "Lord, remember me in Your kingdom." Holy Spirit, fountain of love, I call on You with trust: "Purify my heart, and help me to walk as a child of light. —Author unknown

Never Wasted

Never Wasted

By Richard Maffeo

I know your deeds and your toil and your

perseverance . . . (Revelation 2:2)

Sacrifice.

No one knows how its claws can tear the soul like the one who for decades gave up a dream, a life, a goal, a purpose . . . .

Given up.

Thirty. Forty. Years.

Given up to walk instead the walk He charted, only to find at the end of the course what seems ashes and emptiness and loneliness. The hope of something better, the prayers for something precious, the yearning for something beautiful disappear like wisps of smoke in the wind, and the voice on the shoulder taunts:

“What could have been if you’d walked the road you gave up?”

Oh! But like the child who gave his few fish to Jesus and the Lord fed thousands; Like the widow who gave her last pennies to God, and whose story has encouraged millions across the millennia, nothing sacrificed to Jesus is ever useless. No offering ever returns empty. No life or years, no fish or coin – nothing is ever a waste when given to Christ.

He promised it – and He still promises it:

Be steadfast. Immovable. Abounding always in the work of the Lord, because your labor, your sacrifice, your purpose,

and perseverance is not now, nor has been, nor will ever be in vain when done for, and offered to, the Lord.*

*see 1 Corinthians 15:58

It's About the Heart

St. Mark gives us two vignettes in his gospel, each of which makes the same important point for every Christian: God is pleased with what we do for Him when it is all we can do.

The first is of the widow who placed her penny into the Temple treasury. Here is what Jesus thought of that offering: “Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the contributors to the treasury; for they all put in out of their surplus, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on.” (Mark 12:41-44)

A few chapters later, Mark relates another story, this one about a woman with a jar of very expensive ointment. It is likely she’d been saving it for her dowry – if she’d ever marry. She chose instead, according to the custom of the day, to pour it over Jesus’ head as an expression of love.

When some objected to her ‘waste’, Jesus responded: “Let her alone; why do you bother her . . . . She has done what she could (Mark 14:6-8).

Do you see the common theme in these two stories? It’s not at all about how much we place in the offering basket. It’s about doing what we can do, even if what we can do is not a lot in the eyes of others. 

It’s about the heart – and who owns it.