Hidden Harmonies
Threads between first-round draft Scripture
“With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:6-8
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Matthew 5:1-12
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
1 Cor 1:25
When preachers start preaching the lectionary (the schedule of readings many Christian churches follow), it is generally considered sound advice not to try to harmonize all the texts. This temptation is unfair when three of our texts today are so powerful that they deserve multiple sermons by themselves.
I sometimes listen to pop culture podcasts by The Ringer where they treat movies like sports players, doing “drafts” to make up a roster of your favorite movies. For example, if you were filling out a “team” of movies and were picking from all the Best Picture winners of The Oscars, you might draft Forrest Gump to be your top pick. While all Scripture is sacred, if you had to draft Scripture readings to make a team and were picking the best of the best, you could make a case for each of our readings today for a first-round pick.
Let’s take the Beatitudes (Matt 5:1-12). They open the Sermon on the Mount (I’ve listened to a 10-hour audiobook on the Sermon on the Mount alone, and luckily you don’t have to listen to me talk about it for 10 hours). Blessed are the lowly, the suffering, the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning; can you rejoice and be glad? For Jesus tells us that where human justice and human mercy fail, God’s justice and mercy will not. This teaching is literally on the “Apex Mountain” of Christ’s teachings.
But if I’m drafting passages from the Epistles, we have been working through 1 Corinthians for the past several weeks, and now we have the capper of just the first chapter, which certainly harmonizes with the Beatitudes: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength….God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1 Cor 1:25, 27-29) And so, Paul says, this is why God chose you—chose us—who are not that wise in the grand scheme of things, not that powerful, not that noble, though sometimes we do good impressions of all these things.
And for those of us who really just need something simple (and who doesn’t?), Micah 6:8 is a top pick for so many of us because, finally, the Bible has answered a question directly: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy,1 and to walk humbly with your God?” Simple commands. I can just stick that in my pocket and carry it with me. Can the preacher improve upon the words? Surely not.
So while Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ posited that life itself was Christ’s last temptation before he took the cross, the preacher’s last temptation is to try and talk about everything. I can’t do that. But if these passages still seem disconnected, I do yearn for you to hear the same harmonies between these passages that I do.
First, a harmony of comfort.
I have to say that anecdotally, among my friends across political lines, family members, friends, acquaintances, random internet strangers, this has been the most challenging time certainly since the pandemic, perhaps even worse than then, or at least different—the widespread demoralization has been significant. Yet because this cacophony of distress is hardly new, and since suffering is the most ancient of human traditions, hear this old comforting harmony among our texts loud and clear: God chooses those who are down.
How many times can Jesus say “blessed” are you who are suffering in every which way? Paul also emphasizes this to the Corinthians, that “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are.” You are not strong? You have no power? You have no wealth? You feel like you are nothing? Blessed are you—God chose you!
But this pairs with another strong harmony we can hear in our texts: challenge. The mercy and love of Jesus comfort us while challenging us at the same time.
Blessed are you meek, Jesus says, but then in the same sermon, just 40 verses later, he tells us that we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt 5:43-48). What bigger challenge is there than that? Take Micah’s simple instruction that’s still in your pocket: “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.” Honestly, those are often (not always) easy to do for people we love. But, Jesus would challenge us, what good is it to do justice only to people you like, have mercy only for people on your team, and walk humbly with those who already walk humbly with you? Anybody does these things with our friends. But what about with our enemies? What about when it costs you?
But there is an even deeper challenge embedded within God’s comfort. For as comforting as these words are, the challenge is this: do you actually believe them? Do you actually live like you do?
Too many of us Christians, generation after generation, become discipled over and over again not by Jesus but by economies of power. And so while we might be intermittently comforted by the words of the Beatitudes, blessing the poor and the meek, how many of us really trust these blessings enough to do the right thing when the right thing might render us poorer or meeker? How much do our actions really reflect the Beatitudes, and how much do they reflect our lack of faith?
This is why Paul says (to flesh out from how he thought of “Jews and Greeks” in his time) that the cross is a stumbling block for us religious and foolish for the secular.2 The true humble, lowly, reverse power of the cross continues to trip us Christians up over and over whenever our actions show we do not really believe in the power of the cross as much as the power that wins human control of the world. To the Greeks, who are the “secular” crowd of Paul’s time, the power of the cross is laughably self-evidently false, and they have no reason to believe it true. But what is our excuse?
For us Christians, both Micah and the Sermon on the Mount only make sense in the context of the foolish cross. Our minds discipled by power say, “Blessed are the strong, the powerful, those who don’t give in, who don’t back down, who press, who insist, who demand,” because that’s what “works” in human power dynamics. But the foolish cross that Jesus was nailed to did not insist or demand. It was so shocking and scandalous because it contradicts everything they and we know about who and what is truly powerful. The cross challenges our basic instincts.
Playing off these harmonies of comfort and challenge, God gives us one more harmony here, the harmony of sacrifice. This is one we can all sing along to.
The divine language God sings through Jesus is the language of sacrifice. Paul will sing it to his Corinthians, and Jesus sang it in his Beatitudes, but God has been singing it all along through our Old Testament through establishing the sacrificial system that allows us to participate in God’s grace. In Micah, God clarifies the nature and kinds of sacrifice he really loves.
The backdrop of our simple Micah advice is figuring out how to repay God for the debts we have incurred through our sin: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” These are not just hyperboles of Micah’s existing Jewish sacrificial system, but naming things that other cultures were sacrificing to appease their gods of power. What can I sacrifice to make myself right with God? To which God says I don’t want those sacrifices, but your justice, mercy, and humility.
But are these actually opposed to sacrifice? What if we can hear justice, mercy, and humility in the harmony of sacrificial love?
To seek justice is often to sacrifice one’s loyalty to someone who has done wrong. To seek justice often means to sacrifice what is convenient and comfortable (at the very same time when we are so in need of God’s comfort). Seeking justice might paradoxically mean sacrificing our idea of what “mercy” looks like (if we think mercy is “letting someone do whatever they want with no consequences”).
But in the harmony of sacrifice, there is musical, paradoxical tension. Because to love mercy—in Hebrew chesed, or “loving-kindness,” that reflects God’s steadfast covenantal love for us—means sometimes to sacrifice our idea of justice. This is what God does for us in forgiving our sins through sacrificing himself: we have done wrong, but God sacrifices his ability to make the ledger even through vengeance, and instead he makes it even through mercy. Making matters more complicated, in our human justice system (for example) we cannot simply seek mercy for the guilty at the expense of mercy for their victims. Anyone who has ever had to pursue both justice and mercy for people they love knows that this is heartbreakingly impossible for most of us to do both well at once.
How can we, then, pursue both justice and mercy? What is our last sacrifice? Pride; walk humbly. If you want to be countercultural and flout the economies of power, let us walk humbly and keep walking. If you’re like me, your pride and your ego have done good things for you at times, serving you well. They’ve maybe even helped you do some holy work and stand up for others or yourself. Your pride might have helped you to want to be kinder than your unkind neighbors, to be more concerned with justice than the other side’s corrupt politicians. If you were a Pharisee, your pride helped you keep the law. If you’re a Christian, your pride might drive you to be a better Christian. But like rivers of oil, this pride is not the fuel God really wants. He wants us to run on humility. Will we?
In these days where we need God’s comfort more than ever, and when we might feel challenged more than ever to believe in God’s comfort, let us sing in the harmony of sacrifice: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Know that you are blessed if you feel cursed, and that God even chose you to love the world through you. For God did not draft the powerful, the well-off, the loud, or the boastful for his team. He drafted us; he drafted you; he drafted any fool who follows the crucified teacher who gave up his power over and over until the nails pierced flesh. May we believe the good news of God’s grace enough to trust it, walk it, and sing along. Amen.
As I’ll mention later, the word here chesed in Hebrew is sometimes translated as kindness, mercy, lovingkindness, steadfast love, and other similar ideas. It’s one of the more common words in describing God’s love in Hebrew.
“Religious” and “secular” were not concepts that were around in Paul’s time. However, I am arguing that Paul’s use of “Jew and Greek” is less about racial or national identity in and of themselves, but how members generally had a relationship to God. Paul’s sense of his in-group Jews, then, can be understood as how we think of our in-group fellow “religious people” (they know who God is and try to follow his laws), and how Paul uses “Greeks” is as people who basically did not know who the God of Israel was or followed Jewish customs, but lived in a world with lots of competing religions, with a society based on pluralism not unlike our modern secualrity. Like in our times, when there is spiritual pluralism, there can be a common ground of valuing worldly knowledge and wisdom.