Epiphany Sunday — Psalm 119.1-8
On January 30, 1956, while he preached at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, white supremacists bombed Martin Luther King Jr’s home. The bombing was an act of retaliation against the preacher for leading the successful bus boycott. Undeterred, King preached the following Sunday at his Dexter congregation, taking as his text Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. In the written manuscript, King gave his sermon the title, “It’s Hard to be a Christian.”
King began the sermon with a series of laments:
“One of the most prevalent illusions of modern life is the belief that it is easy to be a Christian. In so many quarters Christianity has been relegated to a bundle of sentimental teachings. So Christianity ends up little more than a glorified aspirin tablet, an opiate of the people. We have substituted a cushion for a cross. We have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.”
And then King pivoted with the assertion, “Jesus never left men with such illusions. He made it crystal clear that his gospel was difficult.” The heart of the sermon which followed contrasts the obedience of the Good Samaritan and the two religious men who passed by the man left for dead in the road from Jericho. “The question of the Levite and the Priest,” King wrote, ““What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?” The question of the Samaritan was, “What will happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?” Ultimately the thing that determines whether a man is a Christian is how he answers this question, whether he obeys the law of the LORD.” King’s sermon concluded with a call, which was no doubt amplified by the bombing just days before, “Taking up the cross is the voluntary or deliberate choice of putting ourselves without reservation in obedient service to Christ and his Kingdom; it is putting our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever the cost. Ultimately the thing that determines whether a man is a Christian is whether he obeys the law of the LORD.”
Twelve years later, on April 3, 1968, just hours before his murder, King preached his final sermon to a crowd that had gathered at a Memphis church in support of the city’s sanitation workers. Once again, King took the parable from Luke’s Gospel as his preaching text. “It’s possible,” King speculated, “that the Priest and the Levite did not stop to help the man in the ditch because they were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road.”
The climax of King’s last sermon is now famous for its prophetic prescience, as though the preacher knew his life soon would be ended. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” King proclaimed, “And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Less well-known than the mountaintop crescendo is the candid aside King made in the middle of it, “I just want to do God’s will.”
Christianity is not hard because God is cruel, but because God has a will:“Oh that my ways be steadfast in keeping your statutes!”
The season of the Nativity concludes on the twelfth day of Christmas with the Feast of Epiphany, also known as the Festival of the Three Kings. “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” the magi inquire in Jerusalem, “For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.” Their question is the only sentence they speak in Matthew’s Gospel. What’s more, their appearance is the only positive reference to magi in all of the scriptures.
The LORD lured these particular wise men from the East with the rising of a star because the constellations were where they fixed their reverent gaze. That is, magi were astrologers— professional pagans— supposed dealers in hidden knowledge apart from obedience to the living God. From the wise men, we derive the word magic. Thus, everywhere else in God’s word, magi are figures of suspicion and threat.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah mocks Babylon’s magi as exhausted frauds who “stand helpless before the fire they have kindled, unable to save even themselves.” In the Book of Acts, Luke reports that a magus (singular for magi) named Simon, a man who “amazed the people of Samaria” through spectacle, receives the gospel and submits to baptism. However, when Simon sees that the apostles possess the power to gift the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands, the Magus pulls out his wallet and attempts to purchase the apostolic power, as though it was a con to be traded between grifters. To which Peter rebukes Simon the Magus, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money! Your heart is not right before God…You are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.” Later in Luke’s Acts, when Paul and Barnabas sail to Cyprus, they encounter a magi named Elymas Bar-Jesus whom the apostle indicts, “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the LORD?”
As New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner comments on the Epiphany, with the Exodus the LORD delivered Israel not only from slavery under Pharaoh but also from captivity to its magi and their false worship of “beggarly creatures” such as the stars. “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.” The child the magi adore grows into a LORD who speaks, and when he speaks, he demands not wonder but obedience.
Though our Christmas pageants and Nativity creches always stage the magi alongside the shepherds just moments after Mary gives birth to God, King Herod’s genocidal decree implies Jesus may have been up to two years old by the time the wise men finally arrive in Bethlehem. They are not there as Jesus crowns. Christ may have already learned to crawl by the time they show up with gifts befitting a king. But had the magi come later still; had the star delayed their westward journey until Mary’s boy had found his voice; had they arrived not at a manger in Bethlehem but on a mount in Galilee; if they had heard him command his followers rather than coo at his mother’s breast, then the pagan magi would have been surprised to encounter a God who made explicit moral demands and commanded a particular life.
The star leads them to Christ, but the LORD Jesus will not leave us with an epiphany. He imposes a will to be done. He commands a life lived after his own.
Do not retaliate but turn the other cheek.
Love your enemies.
Give to the one who begs from you.
Take the log out of your own eye before you judge your neighbor.
Put away the sword.
If they had arrived later in the life of Mary’s boy, then Pilate’s victim would have surprised them. No other god but the true God lays his will on us.
One late summer Sunday in my first church:
The assigned scripture that Sunday was later in the Gospel that gives us the magi’s visit: Matthew 18— the passage where Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” And the LORD Jesus answers, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”” After the worship service, the postlude was still playing on the organ and I was standing outside on the church steps ready to greet folks. A woman about my mother’s age at the time marched out of the sanctuary with three kids in tow and elbowed her way in front of an old man with a walker. With absolute fury in her eyes and loud enough for everyone in line to hear she said: “Do you mean to tell me I need to forgive my ex-husband for cheating on me and then walking out on me and the kids?”
I am not so good in these situations. So when she hit me with her question, I replied eloquently, “Uh….” And I qualified and equivocated: “Well...um...Jesus was just talking to Peter not all of the disciples and...Jesus doesn’t say that in every single Gospel...and— you know how preachers are— often Jesus speaks in hyperbole to get his point across...I’m sure Jesus understands how you must feel...”
But she just kept staring at me.
And I stammered some more.
Until finally I surrendered and said, “Um, uh, well, I suppose, yes, I think Jesus would... probably...tell you to forgive him...I guess.”
I expected her to storm off, seething, and maybe send me an email the next morning reiterating all the ways I was an idiot. But she didn’t. She just looked me square in the eye and nodded and said, “Good. I think so too.”
“I just want to do God’s will.”
“Oh that my ways be steadfast in keeping your statutes!”
The one hundred and nineteenth psalm is not only the longest psalm in the Prayerbook of the Bible, it is the longest single chapter in all of the scriptures. Comprised of one hundred and seventy-six verses, the psalm is an acrostic poem of twenty-two stanzas following the twenty-two letters for the Hebrew alphabet. The nineteenth century British preacher Charles Spurgeon called the psalm the “Golden Alphabet.” From Aleph to Taw, Psalm 119 has only one subject, the love of God’s law: “Blessed are those who way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD.”
Just as the heavenly host sing “Holy, holy, holy” not because they repeat themselves but because God is infinite and always newly known, the love of God’s law can have no end, for between God’s will and God personally there is no final difference.
To know the commandments is to know God.
Thus, the law of the LORD is all-encompassing, from Alpha to Omega.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments on this passage:
“As this love of the law can have no end, it is appropriate the psalm goes on at such length. These words want to accompany us all our lives.”
Indeed Trappist monks chant the entire Psalter every two weeks in order “to know the whole of David;” they sing a portion of this psalm every day to avoid tackling all of it on any single day. Curiously, for all its length the psalm contains nothing about the content of God’s law. It cites no concrete commandments. It extols no particular obedience. Rather the psalm insists the fact of God’s law should provoke praise and delight in us; in fact, that the LORD has an explicit will for us is far more a grace than we often realize.
Hailing from Babylon in the East, the magi would have worshipped Marduk, the King of the gods, whose astral sign was the planet Jupiter. The magi would have invoked the deity Shamash when they swore legal oaths or signed contracts. If any of the wise men wanted children, they would have appealed to Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. Marduk, having defeated the agent of chaos Tiamat, was the guarantor of the cosmic order but neither Marduk nor any other Babylonian deity imposed commands upon creatures. Likewise, the pagan god Moloch may have demanded the sacrifice of Canaanite children but Moloch did not otherwise make any demands of them.
The Roman imperial pantheon required your patriotism, but none of the empire’s deities had any intentions for its people— only your compliance.
By contrast, from the very beginning of the Bible the true and living God speaks law.
We often assume the Bible’s creation story is its least idiosyncratic— its most universal; nothing could be further from the truth. Unique among religions, the Bible’s creation story posits a peculiar claim. Namely, the LORD creates not simply by speaking but by issuing commands.
“And God said, “Let there be light.”
Notice what follows: the command is obeyed, “And there was light.”
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.”
Obedience follows, “And it was so.”
Someone made it so!
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds.”
Again, the command is obeyed.
Who was present prior to creation to obey the LORD’s command? The text of Genesis itself supplies the answer, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Or as the Nicene Creed formulates it into dogma, “We believe in one LORD, Jesus Christ…by whom all things were made.”
Not only is the law not inimical to the gospel, Christ’s obedience to the Father’s commands is their means of creation.
The existence of the world is the event of obedience.
God speaks to bring the world to pass. He utters a command. The command is obeyed. And the obeying act is the existence of the world. Just so, the LORD’s creating of the world is agency of the same sort as the Torah by which he creates his people Israel. The commandments are not a heteronomous imposition of a set of rules, for they constitute the same moral address by which God call us into being in the first place. To exist in God’s world and to live under God’s law are the same thing. Or as Thomas Aquinas puts, “the law is the grace of the Holy Spirit.”
The commandments are the grace of the Holy Spirit.
“Good. I think so too,” the mother with the three kids in tow said to me on the church steps.
I smiled, relieved. I wiped the flop sweat from my forehead and waited for her to move on her way, but she kept standing there, peering at me.
“Can I help you?”
“How?”
“How what?”
“How am I supposed to forgive him?”
“I don’t have a damn clue,” I said.
But then I looked down the sanctuary aisle at an old, gruff woman named Dot, a survivor of domestic abuse.
“I haven’t a clue,” I said, pointing my finger at Dot, “but over there is someone here who knows the way.”
“Thanks,” she replied, “With all the chaos in my life right now, knowing what I am supposed to do— it feels like a gift.”
“You have commanded your precepts
to be kept diligently.
Oh that my ways may be steadfast
in keeping your statutes!
I will not be put to shame,
having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.”
In his Gospel, Matthew reports the magi speaking only a single sentence. More revealing, the Evangelist relays what the wise men do after they fall down and worship the incarnate God.
They obey his command.
When an angel of the LORD warns the magi not to return to King Herod, they do not return to King Herod but go home by a different way.
There is no worship of this God without obedience to him.
In an essay on catechesis, the theologian Robert Jenson notes that the ancient Christians intentionally trained converts from paganism because life in the church was simply too different from life outside of the church for people to tolerate the transfer without some preparation.
Jenson writes:
“The church did not start to teach just because everyone does it, but because she had a specific need to do it, peculiar to her own life. Pagan converts were used to religious cults that had no moral content, that centered often on bloody sacrifice, and that were oriented— as we might now put it— to the “religious needs” of the worshipper. With the gospel, they were now entering a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God. They were entering a cult centered around an un-bloody and therefore nearly incomprehensible sacrifice. And most disorienting of all, they were entering a cult that made explicit moral demands…The list went on and on of things that converts’ previous society regarded as rights, that the church regarded as sins. If converts were to stand up under all these infringements on their personal pursuit of happiness, they needed time under the care of moral instructors.”
As Jenson puts it in his own Large Catechism:
“The commandments appear in Scripture as God’s own second-person word of his intentions for his human creatures, “You shall . . . .” God’s work on creatures is not random but morally purposeful. He creates and redeems us to be this and not that: faithful rather than questing, pious rather than neglectful, communal rather than autonomous, chaste rather than liberated, helpful to the fabric of community rather than harmful to it, mutually pleasured rather than covetous…To hear God’s command is, therefore, to be refreshed in my very being.”
Though in his preaching Martin Luther King often returned to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, his final sermon stands apart for how much of it dwells on the preacher’s own looming death. “Like anybody,” he preached, “I would like to live a long life— longevity has its place. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything, I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
And then— almost as an aside— King said, “I just want to do God’s will.”
The Reverend Samuel Billy Kyles was a friend of King’s and the pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis. Rev. Kyles had been seated only a few feet away and had helped an exhausted King to his seat that night after the sermon.
He recalled the sermon as an ordeal for the preacher:
“There had been so many death threats against his life, especially since he had come out against the war in Vietnam. But he talked about death more that night than we’d heard him talk about it in a long while. He preached himself through the fear of death. He just got it out of him. He just dealt with it, by focusing on doing the will of God.”
“I will keep your statutes;
do not utterly forsake me!”
It is hard to be a Christian.
Not because the LORD is cruel.
But because in Jesus Christ, this jealous, highly opinionated God has revealed to us more of his will than any of us are willing to do.
Which means it is gospel indeed that the Aleph of this long psalm about the law ends not in the here and now but with the future tense, “Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments. I will praise you with an upright heart, when I learn your righteous rules. I will keep your statutes.”
Hear the good news:
You will!
You will keep all his commands.
Just as Christ’s parables are a picture of his future Kingdom, the LORD’s commands are harbingers of your future you.
You will be forgiving.
You will be truthful.
You will beat Chinooks and Blackhawks into John Deeres.
Again, hear the good news:
God not only tells you what he has made you to be.
God will yet make of you what he intends.
Look—
No one knows how far they fall short of God’s glory like a preacher who’s paid to study the scriptures every day.
Nevertheless, hear the good news:
You may not always know how to do God’s will. But— give thanks— God has one! For you! Yours is a purpose driven life, but— give thanks— you’re not the one in the driver’s seat! The same God who said, “Let there be light” (and there was light) is the God who says, “Forgive.” And he will not leave you alone until forgiveness is born in you. The same God who commanded the stars in their courses has commanded your life towards the likeness of his Son. And he will not give up on you until he can scarcely tell the difference. God speaks, and what God commands comes to be. Light appears. Life rises. Creation just is because the Son obeys the Father’s will. And one day you will be made who he intends.
In the meantime—
Before he asks you to forgive seventy-seven times,
Before he commands you to love your enemies,
Before he sends you back down the Jericho road—
He sets a table.
And this law does not accuse, it invites, “Take and eat.”
This is the obedience that is easy enough.
Even for a sinner like you.
This is the command that creates what it demands.
This is the will of God you can keep today.
You do not come to this table because you have obeyed. You come because Christ has obeyed for you. Here he gives you his body—the body that did the Father’s will unto death. Here he gives you his blood— the blood that seals a new covenant of mercy. And fed by this obedience, strengthened by this grace, sent by this promise, you will leave this table— like the magi from the manger— and discover that the hard demands of this highly opinionated LORD have begun to loosen their grip.
For the God who commands is the God who feeds.
The God who wills is the God who gives.
This is the easy obedience.
All the rest will follow.
Of all his statutes to keep, the first one is right in front of you.
Come.
To come to the table is to fix your eyes on all his commands.
For the loaf and cup are him.
Take and eat.
And you will never be put to shame.
