Jesus Teaches Us A "rock Ballad"

Fourth Sunday in Course 2024

Let’s all take a moment, maybe even shut our eyes if we are sitting down, and use our imaginations. That’s a great way to start your daily meditation, by imagining a scene from the Scriptures. So let’s all get into our minds a picture of a rock. Not a pebble, not a slingshot stone, but a really big rock. No, try one as big as a hill, or a small mountain. What would such a stone mean to, say a man in the desert in the first century, Jesus’s day?

Well, first of all it meant stability. Jesus Himself recognized that in at least one of His parables. He asked people in His sermon on the plain, recorded by St. Luke, to think of a house built on a big rock, and another built on shifting soil or sand. What happens, He asks, when the floods come? Well, sure, the house on the rock stays in place, and the flood swirls around it; the house on a shifty foundation washes downstream and is split into timberwood. The people inside are injured or destroyed.

Secondly, a rock means safety. I’m reminded here of the book and the less effective movie “Dune.” If you can recall, the film showed a distant planet called Dune, which was covered with sand. It was being explored and settled by humans, but they were being hunted with some giant carnivorous snake-like creatures who burrowed through the sand and grabbed the human prey. The humans, if they felt or heard the wormy predators, would have a short time to sprint in terror to the nearest large rock, which they could climb on for safety. That’s the kind of rock I mean, and it’s a metaphor for a saving God.

The difference, of course, is that we don’t achieve safety–salvation–by sprinting to God and saving ourselves by our own efforts. No way we can do that. Instead, God reached down to us. He communicated His intent to save us, to show His love, through generation after generation of prophet, beginning with Moses. Moses led His people out of Egyptian slavery to a rock–Horeb–where they made covenant with the true God and received His Torah–his Law. They vowed to keep that Law and in turn God promised to protect them and give them the fertile land we now call Israel. Through the years they proved themselves false to the covenant. That brings us to our psalm 95, which we could call the original rock ballad.

We clergy are assigned this psalm to pray at the beginning of our Office every day. It starts off as a joyful song of praise to God as the “rock of our salvation.” We imagine ourselves going into the Temple singing psalms of thanks and praise to God, bowing down in adoration and kneeling, very much like what folks do in our prayer chapels. We recognize that we are the sheep of God’s pasture, and, yes, we are therefore weak like sheep and pretty stupid. That’s what sheep are.

We then are invited around to the other side of the worship, summoned to get into God’s head, so to speak. We speak to ourselves with the voice of divinity. “O that today you would listen.” We are commanded to surrender our hearts of stone, our constant looking out for the wrong number one. We are reminded that at Meribah and Massah out in the desert, the people of Israel griped about Moses and God and demanded to go back to Egyptian slavery. They put God to the test. They got the food and water they demanded, but paid an awful price for their rebellion. We don’t hear that part of psalm 95. Moses and Aaron were consigned never to enter the land of promise. None of the generation that rebelled at Massah and Meribah would ever see that promised land, enter into the rest God wanted to give His holy people.

Even in that land of milk and honey, God’s people continually rebelled, worshiping false gods–demons. They even sacrificed their first-born children to demon-gods like the Canaanites had done. And they were punished by the destruction of their kingdom and by a succession of tyrannies culminating in the Roman empire.

But God never gave up. Here in Capernaum Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary, appeared in the synagogue. When you go to Capernaum you can still see the foundation of the old synagogue He preached in. The demon gods of old reappeared, oppressing an Israelite by causing him to remain unclean, unworthy of participating in the community’s prayer. Jesus rebuked the spirit, commanding him to be silent and come out. Well, he wasn’t silent but he certainly came out. Jesus proved the validity of His teaching, of His law of love, by such demonstrations and miracles. He has brought us together here today as members of His body, as the disciples who can spread His message during the next week. Shall we follow Him without reserve?