The history of Israel is a history of battles between the Israelites and other nations of the Ancient Near East. As different tribes and nations battled for supremacy, for territory, for religious authority it seems the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was made know in the mist of what was a very bloody history.
In today’s OT reading Joshua, who has been the faithful assistant to Moses’ is commissioned by God to lead the people into the Promised Land and to defeat the people who occupy the land. This might make for uncomfortable reading:
The essential message of this commissioning seems to be; live up to the law and then God will give you blessings in this life and earthly success; if you are faithful to him he will be alongside you in all that you do and you shall win every battle you fight.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians strikes a similarly macho, triumphalist sort of note for the Christian reader. The imagined battle that must take place against the devil, the rulers, the authorities and the cosmic powers of this present darkness sounds perhaps uncomfortably aggressive.
For Paul and the communities to whom he wrote there was a very real belief in supernatural forces of darkness. Paul stipulates that the enemy is not of flesh and blood and he seems to be talking of another sort of battle to the real material one in which Joshua and his army engaged. Put another way Paul and his contemporaries recognized the forces at work which were opposed to the good news of Jesus Christ. They saw that there were energies which were bigger than individuals and beyond the strength of any single individual.
In the same way we can observe systems that operate in our society which are opposed to the liberation that belief in Jesus Christ brings. These systems are beyond the power of any single individual to combat but they contribute to the cultural values which influence what our society regards as acceptable. For example the influence and the role of the media has changed enormously in my life time; we might think it is good that public figures are no longer shielded from scrutiny in the way that they once were but when does this scrutiny become abusive? To what extent is it in the public interest to know intimate details about someone’s personal and sexual life? And what are the consequences for children growing up in culture where being famous is seen as an end in itself and public humiliation is a route to fame? At the very least our perception of what it means to be a worthwhile human being becomes distorted. In this context the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness and the gospel of peace are weapons need to combat the erosion of our humanity.
Lent is often a time when we are encouraged to look inward and undertake an audit of our spiritual lives; this is a necessary and fruitful step in our discipleship, but we cannot do this apart from examining the forces which structure our society, our way of life and many of our relationships. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a call to action as much as prayer.
Our Lenten discipline cannot be reduced to being good in a personal, private way; it is a time when we are called to challenge the structures of injustice which constrain our society and the lives of the most vulnerable. It is for this reason that we have made the South Chapel into a chapel of prayer for those who are oppressed and suffering- in many cases a suffering caused by structures and forces which are contrary to the love of Jesus Christ.
In both Joshua and Paul’s letter the call to action occurs alongside the call to pray and meditate. It seems for Joshua and his followers the book of the law needs to be internalized “The book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall mediate on it day and night”. In the same way the Ephesians are called to pray: “Pray in the spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication.”
Whilst we are called to take action and to engage in warfare against those things that risk destroying us we must be grounded in a mature spiritual faith. We are neither to retreat into an inward spiritual life divorced from the world around us nor to engage in action which is separate from our relationship with God.
Our engagement with the book of the law in the OT and prayer in the new means that what might be seen as external weaponry becomes part of who we are.
A lot of the history of the OT addresses the relationship between the people and the law given to Moses. They are urged by the prophets to internalize this law- to tell it to their children, to put it on their doorposts; it seems the prophets recognized how hard it is to obey something which is distinct and separate from the human person. Instead the law needs to reside within them. Time and time again the people act as though the law exists to constrain them- as an external agent which they resent. The prophet Ezekiel writes of God’s desire for his people to abide by the law he has given them:
26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28 … and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
It is as if God finally concedes that the law will always be seen as external to the people and that they need to be given the means to follow his laws; this is imagined as a new heart, a new spirit which means they can follow his statutes.
In our lives of discipleship we are invited to perceive the spirit of God that dwells within us; it is only through recognising God within us – the Spirit of Jesus within us- that we can take action which reflects God’s purposes and desires. Prayer is one of the ways that we uncover God’s spirit in us-
An experience of prayer which leads us to God’s spirit will not be wholly comfortable. As the monk Martin L. Smith has written:
“We realize that if the Spirit is shaping and redeeming and empowering and purifying us from within, most of the judgments we make about the movements of our heart run the risk of being hasty and crude. Now the important thing is not to try to run our lives by conventional criteria but to suspend judgment and patiently listen to our own feelings and experiences so that the Spirit can reveal what is going on.”
This might sound like an introspective journey divorced from the world around us but Martin Smith writes that the Spirit within us compels us to “identify with a broken world and to bring it within the reconciling embrace of God. Intimacy with God, identification with the fallen creatures of God, always both.”
Amen