Old Testament: Jeremiah 11:1-8, 14-20
Psalm 95, 88 * 91, 92
Epistle: Romans 6:1-11
Gospel: John 8:33-47
In the six years I’ve been writing Lenten meditations, this is the first time none of the lectionary selections that fell my way greeted me with a clear invitation to engagement. What struck me immediately with this group were the calls for retribution, considerations of death, sin, and cries from the pit of tribulation.
Most comfortable with the Gospel, though, I read all of John 8, putting the reading in broader context. Finally — an invitation to engagement delivered. Earlier in chapter 8, Jesus tells the chief priests and Pharisees, “you are of this world, I am not of this world” (23). In verses 31 and 32, Jesus says that following him will result in knowing the truth and “the truth will make you free.” Countering that as descendants Abraham they are bound by no one, Jesus’s inquisitors insist that they have no need of being made free.
Jesus emphatically makes clear, however, that the devil — not God — is their father and that they are bound by their own sin. Were they descendants of Abraham, they would listen to the truth as Abraham did. However, opting to believe the devil’s lies, they cannot hear Jesus’s word; He asserts, “you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.”
Here, then, is the call for invitation. And it is not what I was originally looking for; it is not the text inviting me in. It is the obligation on my part to make room in me for the text. It is my place to make the invitation, to make the room, for his truth. So, too, must I learn to make room for the frustration of the Hebrew prophet who mourns over Jerusalem and Judea, for the Psalmist desperate to have God deliver him from his enemies, for the apostle struggling to find the argument, the rhetoric, the reasoning, that will communicate the truth of Jesus in a world accustomed to seeking validation in physical wealth and political power. But Jesus is “not of this world.” A simple lesson. A hard lesson. A humbling lesson. A Lenten lesson.
Susan Hagen
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