The Golden Ass

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5, Friday Day 6, and Saturday Day 7.

***

Sunday, Day 1 of a New Week:

“Amen I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who have been sent to you, how often I have wished to gather your children, the way a bird gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not wish it. See: For you, your house is abandoned to desolation. For I tell you, henceforth, you most assuredly will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who come in the name of the Lord’.” – Matthew 23: 36-39

How will we escape the destiny of our path towards abandonment to desolation, utter useless to God, total rot and fruitlessness before the Anointed? Can we enter into His election for us, into His desire and beckoning into shared life with those who are not like us in ways we would otherwise, without the reign and royal sending of the Spirit and thus without a conversion of our very desires, never do?

What does our waiting for the Son of Man who comes in the name of the Lord to take his throne look like? What does that tell us about what awaits us when what we think we hope for actually comes to fruition?

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

*Pictured here: Dead Confederate soldiers in the sunken road after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, September 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner