Psalm 60
OT Reading: 2 Samuel 7.18-end
NT Reading: Luke 19.41-20.8
Text: By whose authority …? (Luke 20.2)
It matters to have authority. I can’t establish a company or set myself up to practise a profession such as medicine, dentistry, or law without having the authority to do so. I need a licence to drive my car, and another to stand here in this pulpit. I need a certificate from the Disclosure and Barring Service if I occupy a position of trust and authority which might enable me to exploit vulnerable children or older people. We are surrounded on every side by systems of authority designed both to constrain and to protect us.
No wonder Jesus wept as he entered Jerusalem, the high place of that religious authority that ought to have recognised and welcomed him. He knew how deeply His Father cared for the Jewish people, whom He had rescued from famine, and slavery, nurturing them in a promised land. They were the chosen people to whom he had given a framework of law within which to live, a succession of judges to rule in accordance with that law, and prophets to warn and guide them. He was reluctant to allow them to have kings like other nations, but in David he had found for them a king after his own heart.
In the prayer which was read for our first lesson, we saw something of David at his best – loving and generous, courageous in the face of the enemy, and yet humble before God. Comfortably ensconced in his fine new palace, David had looked about him, seen that the ark of the covenant was still housed in a tent, and offered to build for it a permanent dwelling – a temple. But there was something about living in a tent that God rather liked. Perhaps he wanted to discourage any notion that he could be confined to one holy place. Perhaps He wanted His people to remember that He was forever moving on. But He loved David, He wanted to respond to the generosity of his impulse, and perhaps there was a certain logic about having a permanent place of worship now that his people had established themselves in the land where they should remain undisturbed. So he was disposed to say yes. Yes but not yet. The building of a temple would be left to David’s son. Meanwhile his response to David’s plea was characteristically generous (2 Sam 7.27). No, I don’t want a house, not yet anyway, but I will build YOU a house, not a physical structure but a dynasty to last forever.
David’s prayer is his response to this amazing and unexpected gift. His own proposal for the building of a temple has been rejected, but he moves on in immediate acceptance of God’s own plan, which he finds deeply humbling. First of all he thanks God for bringing him thus far, from shepherd boy to mighty king in Jerusalem. And then he confesses to being quite taken aback by the generosity of what God has promised for the future. ‘Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me, your throne shall be established forever’ (v 17). That promise seems not to have been fulfilled, which raises some interesting questions to which I shall return in a minute, but what a staggering promise to receive. David is left speechless – What more can he say? (v20). And he goes on in his prayer to see it as a tribute not to himself but to God’s people, Israel, and to the glory of God himself. ‘Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, … doing great and awesome things for them?’ (v 23). And David continues in this vein of heart-felt thanksgiving, concluding with a prayer for God’s blessing: ‘for you, O Lord God, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever’ (v 29).
Which brings us back to that awkward question – if God promised David that his house would stand forever, what happened? Did God not know that David’s house would die out? Surely not. Did David misunderstand the promise that was made to him? Perhaps. Even those who are close to God are capable of misunderstanding Him. But I would like to suggest that we have something more important than that to learn here about the nature of God’s promises. For my part I do not doubt that God intended David to understand that His love for him and for his people was steadfast and unchanging. God’s love is indeed forever, and He is faithful to His promises, always and forever. It is we who break the covenant relationship of God’s promise and our response, as David’s descendants would do. It was only in the face of their persistent and wilful disobedience that God found Himself obliged – if His promises were indeed to be fulfilled – to find radical new ways of doing so. He would have to act not through the house of David and the people of Israel as humanly conceived, but through a new Israel – through the Church.
When we contemplate our inheritance of God’s promises in place of the house of David and the people of Israel, we are not talking about a deft exercise in sleight of hand or subtle exploitation of the small print. Far from it. Making the transition to the new Israel entailed the most costly act of love the world has ever known. As we were reminded in our anthem (Ireland: Greater love), ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree’.
And now it is our turn to give joyful thanks, as humbly as David did, that we are the undeserving recipients of his love, and of the generosity of his promises. But there is a warning in all this too. There can be no grounds for complacency. Our God is very patient with us as we struggle to follow where He is leading us. He has accepted our need for structures of authority in Church and State which we try to use to buttress and entrench our best intentions, but he pleads with us not to be so blinded by the structures we have created that we prioritise their defence over the need to follow where He is leading us. Embarrassing as it may be for those in power, our structures of authority have to give way in the face of his deep compassion for the poor and vulnerable and his fierce zeal for justice and mercy and truth. We have all seen in recent months how readily powerful leaders in Church and State can get those judgments disastrously wrong.
Jesus wept as he entered Jerusalem. He wept because he knew how fickle the crowd would be, as well as how resolutely their leaders would oppose him. He wept because he sensed the disaster into which their misdirected sense of national destiny would lure them. He longed to lead them in the way of peace and justice and reconciliation, but he knew they had a different agenda.
By whose authority do you do these things? The Pharisees knew perfectly well by whose authority John the Baptist had preached and baptized. If they would only open their eyes, they could see just as well whose authority lay behind Jesus’ mission of teaching and healing. It was they who had a problem when His concern for love and justice threatened to overturn their structures of power and authority as roughly as he had overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple courtyard.
In the church we are now the inheritors of that covenant relationship of promises and responsibilities. We need to be forever alert to the new directions in which God may be leading us, lest we too may be swept aside and left behind, as God Himself moves on to establish His kingdom.