2017 Belmont University Lenten Devotional GuideSample

For those who wish to draw from, imitate and enact the thinking of Jesus of Nazareth (having “the mind of Christ” as Paul puts it) to see the world as He sees the world, it’s sometimes helpful to think of him as a student of the prophets and the psalms. The good news of God’s kingdom is a vision of which Jesus was himself a learner and a lifelong discerner. When we forget this, reducing the gospel to the personal forgiveness of our own personal sins, we miss the larger fact of God’s righteous purpose for the whole of creation and the accompanying ethic of radical hospitality this purpose entails. This long work of discernment, of paying attention and enacting what we of God’s goodness, is evident in today’s scripture reading.

We’re right to imagine Jesus receiving the prophet Isaiah’s oracle as normative for the Jewish community in a violent world: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation will reach to the end of the earth” (49:6). “What kind of light?” Jesus and other hearers of the prophets were sure to have wondered. And what sort of salvation should those who worship the God of Israel hope to see in the land of the living? According to John’s gospel, Jesus tells his hearers that the thriving God intends is the yield of an other- centered love in the form of community: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it does, it bears much fruit” (12:24). Self-giving, Jesus seems to insist, is the currency of the kingdom of come. And those who take this path are seen to be what he refers to as “children of light” (12:36).

In our day, this path of downward mobility, of emptying oneself for love of others is radically countercultural, especially when the allegedly powerful would divide the world up between winners and losers, successes and failures. But the God made known in Jesus relentlessly overturns our standards. Or as Paul puts it in his letter to the community of Corinth, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (11:25). Our challenge is to bring God’s wisdom to our every interaction and estimation of our fellow human beings. The victory of Jesus’ seeming lack of success goes before us.

DAVID DARK
Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts
College of Theology & Christian Ministry