Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17 Page 794, BCP
Domine, probasti
1
LORD, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
2
You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.
3
Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.
4
You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.
5
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.
12
For you yourself created my inmost parts; *
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
13
I will thank you because I am marvelously made; *
your works are wonderful, and I know it well.
14
My body was not hidden from you, *
while I was being made in secret
and woven in the depths of the earth.
15
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
all of them were written in your book; *
they were fashioned day by day,
when as yet there was none of them.
16
How deep I find your thoughts, O God! *
how great is the sum of them!
17
If I were to count them, they would be more in number than the sand; *
to count them all, my life span would need to be like yours.
John 1:43-51
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
One theme running through today’s readings from Samuel, the Psalms, to Nathaniel’s response in John chapter 1 is that we are known, thoroughly known by the Lord.. A line from our liturgy addresses God as one “from whom no secrets are hid.” This is both a source of consternation when we feel we deserve judgment and it is a source of confidence when we are alone in a hard place and in need of consolation.
I. Our Lord knows us because he has walked where we walk.
II.
III. He learned obedience by the things he suffered.
He knows our frailty, our temptations, our suffering. (Hebrews and Isaiah 53)
God only knows, is a common phrase in our conversation. We use it when exasperated, and follow that saying with the phrase “and He isn’t telling.” God only knows and he isn’t telling is our cynical response to being alone in this world.
We feel, as our poets and novelists have expressed, that we are alone in the world; unknown and unknowing.
“How do you know me” was the question Nathaniel put to Jesus on their first meeting.
How do you know me is a great question to ask God. How do you know not only technically, but from the aspect of thoroughness and with what concern.
God knows because He entered into our life. He knew hunger and thirst and anger and disappointment and suffering and humiliation and death with brigands on a cross while being mocked by the government and the crowds.
He knows.
Isn’t that our greatest complaint? Here we are, working our hearts out and no one notices or cares. Isaiah, I believe said it well in Isaiah 63, at the end of his Suffering Servant Poems. The Suffering Servant poems tells us God knows our frame that we are dust, that God understands human suffering.
But God knows something more that the world doesn’t know at all, and that Christians sometimes forget.
Finally, finally there will be a day of retribution of vindication.. Isaiah 53 is well known to Christian because of the Lenten, and Good Friday readings. Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows. . . .we looked upon him whom we had pierced….he was wounded, pierced for our transgressions, bruised-tortured for our iniquities. . .He was despised and rejected by men. . .by his scourging we are healed. We had all strayed like sheep. . .but the Lord laid on Him the guilt of us all. He was afflicted, he submitted to be struck down and did not open his mouth. . .he was led like a sheep to the slaughter.
That is a view of Good Friday from Isaiah who saw the suffering servant Israel hundreds of years before Good Friday and knew that good men suffer at the hands of the evil
But no more. No more. By the time we get to Isaiah 63 the vision has changed. No more is the Suffering Servant a meek lamb of God, not opening his mouth.
At the outset of his ministry, Jesus began with Isaiah 61 that we read from some days ago. Jesus was anointed with the Spirit of God to proclaim the good news to the humble, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and realease to those in prison. Jesus did that in his life time as he walked the Judean roads and the Galilean hills. He did that even as he was dying on the Cross and when, after his death, he invaded the nether world, sheol or hell as the Creed says and emptied the place. He took away captives and led an entourage of those back to heaven with Him. He still preaches through his body the Church, and to this very moment snatches brands from the burning, rescues people from Satan’s grasp.
Read a little farther in Isaiah 61 and it says, that He comes not only to preach and heal, but also to proclaim a day of the vengeance of the Lord. (Isaiah 61:2) That was just a hint – the picture grows vivid in Isaiah 63:
“Who is this coming from Edom, coming from Bozrah, his garments taed red?
Under his clothes his muscles stand out, and he strides, stooping in his might.”
“It is I who announce that right has won the day, I who am strong to save.”
“Why is your clothing all red, like the garments of one who treads grapes in the vat?
“I have trodden the winepress alone; no man, no nation was with me. I trod them down in my rage, I trampled them in my fury; and their life-blood spurted over my garments and stained all my clothing for I resolved on a day of vengeance; the year for ransoming my own had come.
I looked, but there was no man to help.
I was amazed that there was no one to support me; yet my own arm brought me victory, alone my anger supported me. I stamped on nations in my fury, I pierced them in my rage and let their life blood run out upon the ground.”
That stark, horrific picture of the Servant who had Suffered, at last coming in vengeance makes us draw back. We wince at the abruptness, the anger, the wrath. This is not gentle Jesus meek and mild, this is the vengeance, the wrath of God poured out on the earth as pictured in the Book of Revelation.
If the words sound familiar to you, they should, Harriet Beecher Stowe borrowed them for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Up to WWII, the American Civil War may have been the bloodies, most horrifying war in history as there was blasting of cannons and for the first time in major conflict, rapid fire repeating rifles, the forerunner of the machine guns of WWI.
War and killing had become very efficient. Men could be mowed down like cornstalks before a harvester or like splinters wiped from a board by a rasp. Life had become so cheap on this earth that the Day of Vengeance was necessary to make it clear how short sighted and evil mankind had become. Glory Hallelujah! He is stamping out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored. And it still goes on a century and a half later. And there are many many storehouses of grapes of wrath to be visited.
There are some in centuries past who interpreted the apocalyptic visions in Isaiah, Daniel, the sayings of Jesus in Matthew and the Book of Revelation as being all in the future, the end of time. Anyone with open eyes to the evil in this world knows this is not so.
From that Cross, Jesus looked and there was no man to help. God knows the utter depths of our loneliness and despair. “I looked, and there was no one to help.” From that Cross, the very human Jesus recited a Psalm as He died, saying “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?”
So He knows.
He knows because he knew the Father who created us in the Father’s image.
He knows therefore our creativity and aspirations.
Verse 13
Hagar’s story. Hagar was simple. She simply wanted a space in this world to live and bring up a child. Church people, specifically Abraham’s wife Sarah, was not willing to make that space. Sarah drove out Hagar, the slave woman and her baby. We shouldn’t think Sarah so different from us at times. After all, has not the Church often turned its back on fallen women? We ought to look at that word carefully; was a woman such as Hagar a fallen woman, implying a failure a weakness on her part? Mary Magdalene; she who bathed Jesus feet with her tears, was she a fallen woman? Perhaps Hagar and Mary Magdalene, like us, were complicit in the bringing about the situation in which they found themselves. However, we should also ask ourselves, were they fallen of their own weakness or were they pushed?
Many, many people take on inferior roles because they were pushed and then, the Church too often looks askance at these we perceive to be fallen and like the Levite in the Story of the Good Samaritan, carefully pass by the wreckage on the other side of the street.
Hagar simply wanted space to live. . . as do we.
Mary with her baby in a stable. What did she and Joseph want? Protection from the evil, murderous government of Herod. A simple space in which to live. Even Jesus, in today’s Gospel was greeted by one of his first disciples with the question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
We need a better view – a vision such as Hagar affirmed. The God of My Vision who hears me.
We have such a one in Jesus the Christ who promised to be with us always, even to the end of the ages.
BE THOU MY VISION
‘Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.
Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.
Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.
High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.
This vision is promised by our Lord when we seek his face. It is he who said,
I will be with you always even to the end of the ages.
