The work of faith

Posted on by | No Comments

This from John Piper, via Of First Importance:

Faith is looking away from ourselves to another. Faith is total dependence on another. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window with the glory of Christ on the other side. Faith looks to Christ and enjoys him as the sum and judge of all that is true and good and right and beautiful and valuable and satisfying.

Amen to that.  That’s the reason we resist faith, just as it’s the reason we resist grace.  The Reformed tradition emphasizes that salvation is by faith, not by works, and that even faith comes to us as God’s gift, not as the result of our own efforts; but there is one work, of a sort, that is required.  The work of faith, if you want to call it that, is accepting our displacement from the center of our universe; it’s the willingness to look away from ourselves, not only to acknowledge our dependence but to acknowledge our insufficiency and our need to follow rather than to carve our own path, and to find our joy in another rather than in ourselves.

Pastoral subtext

Posted on by | No Comments

Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet:  Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life.  I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it’s from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine.  (Warning:  there are some glitches in the audio.)

The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way:  “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will.  There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.

He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life.  He uses the example of  the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.

What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside.  If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:

That’s how you know how to do better ministry.  How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.

This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching).  One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.

It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement.  I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.

Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people.  It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things.  Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit.  It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.

Coming down to earth

Posted on by | No Comments

I’m a big fan of Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, the writer/director behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E; I have tremendous respect for his creative gifts and approach (which he discussed in a fascinating interview last June), and I think he tells great stories well.  My lovely wife disagrees with me, but I think WALL-E‘s the better of the two; that’s no putdown to Nemo by any means, it’s just that WALL-E works on so many levels and really connects the intimate story of the two main characters to the epic background story of the human race and the fate of the planet Earth.

Down to Earth

Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well, come on down.

All those rules don’t apply
When you’re high in the sky,
So, come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus:
We’re coming down to the ground—
There’s no better place to go;
We’ve got snow up on the mountains,
We’ve got rivers down below.
We’re coming down to the ground;
We hear the birds sing in the trees,
And the land will be looked after,
We’ll send the seeds out in the breeze.

Did you think you’d escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it,
You’re always afraid of the change.

You’ve got a lot on your chest;
Well, you can come as my guest,
So come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus

Like the fish in the ocean,
We felt at home in the sea;
We learned to live off the good land,
Learned to climb up a tree.
Then we got up on two legs,
But we wanted to fly;
When we messed up our homeland,
We set sail for the sky.

Chorus

We’re coming down (down)
Coming down to Earth (down)
Like babies at birth (down)
Coming down to Earth (down to Earth)
We’re gonna find new priorities (down)
These are extraordinary qualities (down)
(Down, down to Earth)

Chorus

Words:  Peter Gabriel; music:  Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman
©2008 Pixar Music/Wonderland Music Company Inc.
From the movie WALL-E

Is the Obama administration leading us to . . . fascism?

Posted on by | 1 Comment

It sounds startling, especially with all the voices calling him a socialist—but in one way, at least, that’s actually correct, as Thomas Sowell points out:

Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.

It’s a great piece; Dr. Sowell covers a number of topics in his inimitable way, putting his own spin on the standard “notes” column, and it’s well worth your time to read the whole thing.  Here’s another excerpt to encourage you to do so:

Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent. . . .

Barack Obama’s favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming “peace in our time.”

Frightening thought, that.

Reader’s guide: posts on faith

Posted on by | No Comments

Keeping faith in mind
Is it a choice between brains and belief? No.

A matter of trust
Do we really believe God knows and wants what’s best for us?

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
Flannery O’Connor was right: it’s harder to believe than not to.

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason
Learning from St. Augustine.

Thought on belief
We’re wired to believe.

Statement of faith
Just because I believe in God doesn’t mean it came—or comes—easily.

The stubborn faithfulness of God
In the end, this is what really matters.

God’s specialty: life out of death

Posted on by | No Comments

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord:
look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;
for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.
For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

—Isaiah 51:1-3 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks in the church these days who are lamenting the state of American culture and saying pessimistic things about the future of this nation; I know this in part because there are days when I’m one of them.  I think, though, that we would do well to step back from that a bit and realize that while it certainly might well be all downhill from here for the USA, our pessimism on that point isn’t justified by our faith.  The unstated assumption behind that pessimism is that God can’t overcome the unrighteousness of Americans—and that just isn’t true.  On this point, we would do well to consider this passage from Isaiah, and think about it carefully.

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek me; listen and look.” He’s addressing the faithful remnant within Israel—the people who are still seeking God and pursuing his righteousness, who have neither turned their backs on him nor rejected his servant. These are the ones who are willing to trust God—but even for them, it’s hard.

Indeed, maybe for them it’s especially hard, despite their faith, because they see their people’s dire situation much more clearly than their more secular friends and relatives. They can see beyond Israel’s physical exile to their much deeper and more serious spiritual exile, the distance of the people’s hearts from God, and their consequent spiritual barrenness and deadness; they can see past the obvious difficulty of Israel’s deliverance to the real difficulty that underlies it, and so they worry—not that God is unable to deliver his people, or that he doesn’t care enough to do so, as other Israelites do, but that the faithlessness of their people will somehow sabotage everything in the end anyway. They trust God, but they know better than to trust his people.

To them, God says, “Listen to me: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” A quarry is not a place of life; nothing comes out of it but dead stone. This is an apt metaphor to describe Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of their people, for Sarah was barren, and both were far past childbearing age; even now, with our advanced technology, we don’t see 90-year-olds having children. When God says, “When I called Abraham, he was but one,” he’s not kidding; and yet, as God points out, “I blessed him and made him many.”

The very foundation story of the family that became the nation of Israel is a story of God bringing life out of barrenness and deadness; that sort of miraculous birth is at the core of their national identity. “Trust me even in this,” God is saying, “because I’ve done even this for my people before.” What is now a wasteland, he will make “like Eden”—and this doesn’t just mean physical life, but also spiritual life, for Eden isn’t merely a physical paradise, it’s the place before sin, and before the curse of God that fell on us because of our sin.

As such, we should think long and hard before concluding that anyone, or any nation, is too messed up and too spiritually dead for God to revive.  God spoke, and a 90-year-old woman had a baby; he spoke, and a virgin bore a son.  He spoke, and Jesus who had been crucified rose from the dead.  What can he not bring to life, if he decides to speak?

(Partially excerpted from “The Herald of Salvation”)

In defense of the citizen punditry

Posted on by | No Comments

When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I’m still a believer in the underlying principle, even if term limits are a bad way to realize it. We should not have a separate class of professional politicians; that undermines the very nature of representative government.

Our leaders are, in large part, representative of no class and no group but their own; while they retain some connection to the voters who elect them, they have shed any real identification with us, any real sense of belonging to and with us and being a part of us, in favor of their new class, their new group, their new culture. It’s a class and a culture which has some resemblance to the country as a whole, including a roughly similar ideological spectrum from left to right, and so we can select people whose voting patterns are more or less congenial to our beliefs—but this doesn’t mean that they share our cultural referents or that they actually think like the rest of us, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking they do. We should expect most politicians, even those with whom we most agree, to at least occasionally do something we find completely incomprehensible, because they’re operating in a different reality than ours, with different priorities.

I don’t know how we solve this; I don’t even know that there is a solution. Happily, however, I believe we’re seeing a solution arising for a linked problem: the hegemony of the professional punditocracy.

Just as I don’t think there should be professional politicians, so I don’t think we’re better off for having professional pundits; I believe in citizen pundits just as I believe in citizen politicians, and for the same reasons. Living in the echo chamber does bad things to your understanding of the world. You can imagine the effect if the only mirrors you ever saw were funhouse mirrors—it would distort your vision and give you a false view of yourself and the world around you; the effect of becoming entirely a creature of the political inside is similar. Even the best of the pundit class suffer the effects of having no real perspective on the outside world.

Here, however, the Internet and the rise of the blogosphere is providing a counterweight. While I grant that the blogosphere can’t simply supplant the news media because it is itself dependent on the work of professional reporters, and while Sturgeon’s Law applies here as well as everywhere else (if anything, we might be lucky if as much as 10% of the stuff out there is worth reading), yet what Seattle sports blogger John Morgan says about sports media is true on a much broader scale:

There are two layers of media at work. A nascent shadow media of questionable reputability and standards that, ironically enough, actually pursues the truth, and an established media that reports naïve truth as it’s fed to them.

I would argue that the best of our online commentators have already rendered most professional columnists and talking heads redundant. The MSM haven’t realized this yet, of course—or they haven’t admitted it if they have—and so folks like David Brooks, David Frum, Ellen Goodman, and Jeff Jarvis continue to wield influence; but at this point, they’re only significant because people are still trained to think they’re significant. They’re already obsolete. The only thing keeping them in service is that their true obsolescence hasn’t registered with most of the media consumers in this country . . . yet.

In their place we will see the continued rise of the citizen punditry. This is a development with significant downsides, no question, most notably the sort of vicious nastiness we see in the online comments on newspaper websites like that of the Anchorage Daily News. We’ve had, thanks in considerable part to the professionalization of the media, a period of relative sanity and civility in our political discourse. That’s been unraveling for a while, though, and the growing deprofessionalization of our political commentary will likely only hasten that unraveling; given the behavior of the MSM in the last election, I don’t see any reason to believe that they would be any better in the end.

Over against that, I think the proliferation of citizen pundits will in the end bring a sort of Wikipediazation to our political commentary. The free market doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than a command economy; what we currently have is something of a command economy of opinions, and as the free market of the Internet supersedes it, I think we’ll see a more balanced commentariat emerge than what the MSM has given us for generations. Individual pundits may well be less fair and/or farther from the center (or maybe not, I don’t know), but in the aggregate, I would bet that the result will provide a relatively even portrait of American politics. It’s not that we’ll have a neutral point of view (something which I don’t believe exists anyway), but rather that each point of view will have its equal and opposite, which should make it easier to identify the truth among the competing claims.

Doing so will of course take work on the part of readers; but then, for readers who are willing to put in that work, this may well be the best part of all. It won’t be as easy as simply believing what the newspapers tell them, but it will be far more satisfying . . . and far more free.

Remembering Louie

Posted on by | No Comments

Three years ago today, Louie Heckert died from injuries suffered when he was attacked by a rogue bull moose.  Louie was a long-time member of the congregation I served in Colorado, and he was the most universally beloved man I have ever met.  He was the character in chief in a town full of them, but unlike so many of the others, he was a gentle and welcoming man who always seemed to have a good word for everyone he met.

I will never forget telling my oldest daughter, who was then five years old, that he had been hurt and was probably going to die; her face grew sad and solemn, and she said, “I like Mr. Louie. He’s a nice man; he gives me candy.” There are a lot of things people will remember about him, and the candy is certainly one that children of all ages will remember fondly. There are others that stick in my mind as well, like his standard response when I asked him how he was doing: “Can’t complain, and nobody’d listen if I did.” I knew he had to be joking, but he said it as seriously as he ever said anything, with that twinkle in his eye.  I wish I’d heard all his stories.  I wish I had a good enough memory to recall all the ones I did hear.  I’m glad I got the chance to get to know him.

After his death, folks in Grand Lake put a couple videos together, to help raise money to restore his old black Jeep and to advertise the town (something Louie would have considered an honorable tribute, given how much time and effort he put into advertising the town himself).  Here’s the longer one, which includes interviews with Gene, John Cook, Steve Cormey, and others:

Where does experience come from? Bad judgment

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I haven’t had anything to say about Levi Johnston’s decision to exploit his inadvertent fame by going on national TV to trash his ex-fiancée, because I don’t think there’s all that much to be said, really, and because the folks at C4P have been doing a good job of saying it (here and here); this leaves me with a low opinion of the kid and a lower one of her sister (who does indeed seem to be jealous of Bristol Palin and glad that her brother’s no longer engaged), but so what?  Something did occur to me, though, which I thought might be worth noting:  while I really don’t care all that much about Johnston, being far, far more concerned about the Palin family, I do have to wonder—while all the attention’s on what this kid’s doing to his ex and her family, did any adult sit down and try to tell him what he’d be doing to himself?  Or did any adult in his life even think that far ahead?

Someone should have.  For the short term, this no doubt seems like a great idea to him—make some money, hurt his ex, hurt her parents while he’s at it (since it appears they never cared for him much), get some attention.  But what about the long term?  What effect is this likely to have on his adult life?  It’s hard to say for sure, but it can’t be good.  This whole thing will blow over, the news cycle will move on, the PR effects will fade . . . and then the real meaning of his actions will set in.

Obviously, he’s permanently alienated the mother of his son and her family, which is going to do bad things for his relationship with that son in the future; maybe he’s shallow enough that that will never bother him, but while I think he’s pretty shallow, I don’t see any reason to believe he’s that bad.  And whether he is or isn’t, this is going to hang over any future relationships he might have; any woman who comes along is going to look at him as a man with a son from whose mother he’s estranged because he took advantage of her and betrayed her.  Which is to say, if he wants to get married, have kids, etc., he’s set up a heck of a hurdle for himself to get there.

Then there’s the question of the wider consequences of his actions.  In Alaska, of course, he’s a marked man—everybody knows who he is, and that’s going to be the case for a long time.  There are probably those whose desire to bring down Sarah Palin is so great that his dishonorable behavior won’t hurt him in their eyes . . . but before he goes and applies for a position on Hollis French’s staff, he ought to consider that his evident immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment still won’t recommend him for anything.  Folks like that want to use you, kid, not employ you; they see you as a tool, not someone on whom they want to rely (even if they thought you were actually reliable—a conclusion which your behavior to this point does not tend to support).

Meanwhile, those without a strong political animus against Gov. Palin will focus mainly on what this reveals about Johnston’s character and judgment—and what it reveals isn’t good.  For the rest of his life, he’s going to be the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her.  That’s the sort of thing that gives most people a built-in prejudice against you; it’s the sort of thing that makes it hard to convince folks that you’re trustworthy, responsible, and a man of integrity.  As such, it’s the sort of thing that tends to work against your ability to get good jobs and make a good living; if you do get a job, it can be the sort of thing that makes people not want to do business with your employer.

And that’s not just in Alaska, either.  It will be worst there, no doubt, but even if he leaves the state to get away from the stigma, this is the age of the Internet; anyone looking to hire him, or date him, or work with him, is going to Google him if they don’t know who he is, and if they do that, it will all be there.  Those folks will have to ask themselves whether they want to be associated with the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her—and I suspect that not all that many people will.  Even if they like the political effect of his actions, the fact remains that he didn’t do what he did because he was a deep-cover Democratic Party dirty-tricks specialist, he did it because he’s an immature, low-character jerk (or something of that sort).  What he did before, he might very well do it again—and if you’re associated with him, this time it might be your daughter, or someone else you care about.  As such, even those who like and appreciate his actions at a distance aren’t likely to approve of them close up.

All of which is to say, there’s likely to be fallout from this whole episode for many years into Levi Johnston’s future, and there’s no good reason to think that any of it will be positive.  I could always be wrong, but it seems to me that what Johnston has done is likely to make it harder for him to form another stable romantic relationship, harder for him to get a woman to trust him enough to stay with him, harder for him to get good jobs, and harder for him to keep them.  The support of political liberals for his actions will probably prove to be abstract, not translating into meaningful support for him at a personal level, while the animus of political conservatives will most likely be very concrete and very direct; those who judge him without regard to political concerns will find little good to say about him from his behavior in recent months.  I hope Tyra Banks paid him well for the ratings boost, and I hope he’s smart enough to save most of it . . . I think he may need it.

The Herald of Salvation

Posted on by | No Comments

(Isaiah 51:1-52:12; John 12:12-16)

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek me; listen and look.” If you’ve been here through this series, you’ll note that this appeal is new. In chapters 40 through 48 we read, several times, “Listen to me, O Jacob, O Israel”; with chapter 49, that changes, as the Servant of the Lord begins his speech by saying, “Listen to me, you nations.” With the shift that comes in chapter 49, the audience has changed. Now it’s changed again, to the faithful remnant within Israel—the people who are still seeking God and pursuing his righteousness, who have neither turned their backs on him nor rejected his servant. These are the ones who are willing to trust God—but even for them, it’s hard.

Indeed, maybe for them it’s especially hard, despite their faith, because they see their people’s dire situation much more clearly than their more secular friends and relatives. They can see beyond Israel’s physical exile to their much deeper and more serious spiritual exile, the distance of the people’s hearts from God, and their consequent spiritual barrenness and deadness; they can see past the obvious difficulty of Israel’s deliverance to the real difficulty that underlies it, and so they worry—not that God is unable to deliver his people, or that he doesn’t care enough to do so, as other Israelites do, but that the faithlessness of their people will somehow sabotage everything in the end anyway. They trust God, but they know better than to trust his people.

To them, God says, “Listen to me: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” A quarry is not a place of life; nothing comes out of it but dead stone. This is an apt metaphor to describe Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of their people, for Sarah was barren, and both were far past childbearing age; even now, with our advanced technology, we don’t see 90-year-olds having children. When God says, “When I called Abraham, he was but one,” he’s not kidding; and yet, as God points out, “I blessed him and made him many.” The very foundation story of the family that became the nation of Israel is a story of God bringing life out of barrenness and deadness; that sort of miraculous birth is at the core of their national identity. “Trust me even in this,” God is saying, “because I’ve done even this for my people before.” What is now a wasteland, he will make “like Eden”—and this doesn’t just mean physical life, but also spiritual life, for Eden isn’t merely a physical paradise, it’s the place before sin, and before the curse of God that fell on us because of our sin.

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen, my people; hear me, my nation.” Is God once again addressing all the Israelites? Perhaps, but probably not; this isn’t a return to the “Listen, O Jacob, hear, O Israel” formula of earlier in the book. Given the context, what we’re probably seeing here is yet another step in God’s redefinition of his people. His nation isn’t defined by ethnicity or by borders, but rather consists of all those who pursue righteousness and seek his face, wherever they may come from; and so he promises, “The law will go out from me; my justice will become a light to the nations. My righteousness draws near swiftly; my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations.” To emphasize the enduring nature of his salvation, he declares that even when the earth has worn out from old age and the heavens have faded away like smoke, yet his salvation will still endure, and his righteousness will never fail. The Lord is offering a gift to outlast the very stars, to anyone who will accept it.

“Hear me,” says the Lord; “hear me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my law in your hearts”—and note well, this isn’t the same as saying, “you Jews.” As Paul says in Romans 2, there are many who have the law in their heads because they were taught it, but don’t have it in their hearts because they’ve never lived it; on the other hand, there are also those who’ve never heard the law of God but nevertheless show by the way they live that they have his law in their hearts. To those who know and live out the righteous life of God, he says, “Don’t be afraid of the mockery and scorn of others; don’t be terrified by their hostility and attacks.” As with the heavens and the earth, so with the power of the wicked: it looks too big to conquer, too vast to overcome, and too endless to endure, but in truth it’s merely temporary, and far more fragile than it appears. They will not last, but God’s righteousness will. “The moth will eat them up like a garment, the worm will devour them like wool; but my righteousness will last forever, my salvation through all generations.”

God’s promises to his people, rooted in his miraculous promise to Abraham, are promises for the whole world, for all who will believe, for all who seek the Lord and pursue his righteousness, for all who want to be a part of his people; and they are promises you can bank on—more than you can bank on many banks, these days—because there is no power that can prevent the Lord from fulfilling his righteous and saving purposes. Those who would set themselves against him put their trust in the things of this world—but this world is passing, it will in time wear out and fade away, and God will still be there, and still faithfully keeping his promises. Not even our faithlessness can overcome his faithfulness to us; and so the prophet cries out to the people of Israel, “Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath . . . this is what your Sovereign Lord says: ‘See, I have taken out of your hand the cup that made you stagger; from that cup, the goblet of my wrath, you will never drink again. Instead, I will put it into the hands of your tormenters.’”

Awake, for you have slept through what God has been doing; awake, for he has removed your punishment. Awake, rise up, and put on new strength; shake off the dust of your humiliation, shake off the chains of your slavery, for all that is past, and put on the garments of the glory of the priestly people of the King of kings. This is what God says to his people—and note this: “the uncircumcised and defiled will not enter you again.” The Lord is not only redeeming his people, he is purifying them; they will be pruned of their unholiness and unfaithfulness, and he will make them worthy of the promises he has given them. This is an echo of the promises he gave through Jeremiah and Ezekiel to put a new heart and a new spirit within his people and write his law on their hearts; it’s all a part of his plan to make them in reality who he called them to be.

But how? Look at 52:3: “For this is what the Lord says: ‘You were sold for nothing, and without money you will be redeemed.’” Money had not yet changed hands, so the sale had not been finalized, and the Lord could reclaim his people; reclaim them he would, and just as the seller made no profit in the transaction, so the redeemer would pay no money to reverse it. But he must pay something; what could it be? How would he redeem his people?

The answer to that isn’t spelled out in this passage, of course, but it builds toward that answer. What we do get is that the Lord will redeem his people by the power of his mighty arm. Look back up to 51:9, where we have one other call to awake—but this one directed not to the people of God, but to the arm of the Lord. The prophet evokes the mighty things that the arm of the Lord has done in the past as a reason for confidence that the Lord will deliver his people as he has done so many times before, and God speaks words of comfort to Zion, to the captives in Babylon, and to the Servant. He will reveal his power, and his arm will bring justice to the nations, and hope to the peoples of the earth, as he declares in 51:5; he will show his power and his glory in a new way, rolling up his sleeves and laying bare his holy arm before all the nations, so that people to the farthest reaches of the world shall experience his salvation.

With that last statement, something new enters the picture, because it’s the close of a paragraph that’s one of the loveliest passages in all of Scripture, I think. Look at 52:7: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news.” The NIV’s trying to be inclusive here, and I understand the impulse, but I think in this verse it’s a mistake; I think it needs to be “him,” because I think there’s a very particular him in view here. Remember, the Servant will not merely bring God’s salvation to the nations, he will be God’s salvation to the nations, and I think that’s what Isaiah’s talking about. “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who proclaims peace, who brings good tidings, who proclaims salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’ Your watchmen lift up your voices, and together they shout for joy—when the LORD returns to Zion, they will see it with their own eyes. Burst into songs of joy together, you ruins of Jerusalem, for the LORD has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The LORD has bared his holy arm”—I think “has bared” is better there than the NIV’s future tense—“the LORD has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”

Now, as I read that, that paragraph is tight. It’s tightly woven and closely connected, and I think we’re talking about one thing there, one event. We have here the herald of God’s salvation, but it seems to me that the one who is announcing good news is in fact the LORD returning to Zion; the one who comes to proclaim peace and good tidings is the one who has brought them about, who has redeemed Jerusalem. He is, in fact, the arm of the LORD revealed, in whom all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God. With his arrival in Jerusalem would come the revelation of God’s plan to redeem his people without money and extend his salvation to all the world.

And so it was, on that day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, that day which we remember today as Palm Sunday. The Lord returned, and the whole city saw it with their own eyes, and crowds burst out into song; they cried out “Hosanna!” which means “Save us now!” and their faith that he would do so, though ephemeral, was well placed, for he would indeed do just that; in him, the Lord had bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth would see God’s salvation. In him, through him, God would redeem his people without money. Through him, God would purify his people, giving them a new heart and a new spirit, writing his law within them. Through him, in him, God would extend his salvation beyond Israel to all the nations, even to the farthest parts of the earth.