Sept 11 Jer. 4, Lk. 15:1-10
Jeremiah’s words certainly portray God as a national punisher. Stulman clarifies, “All three indictments assert that the community is on the way to destroying itself by its social malaise and infidelity. For now, God does everything possible to get Israel’s attention. Through images of heaven and earth in disarray, images of cosmic disorder suggest a reversal of creation in order to convey the hopelessness (and helplessness) of the situation. Put differently Jeremiah is saying that the chaos faced in public life reflects a godless outlook. Without a foundation, our structures totter and fall. We are left utterly at sea in the storm and the dark.Terence E. Fretheim : God is in relationship and is not a neutral dispenser of justice, not dispassionate, but passionate about life with us. God works in the dense interconnections of life and that sweeps up people in its wake.Walter Brueggemann : that prophetic discourse “is not a blueprint for the future.an attempt to engage this numbed, unaware community in an imaginative embrace of what is happening ... because ... evil finally must be answered for. He emphasizes the anti-creation character of this: a return to pre-creation chaos, disorder, disharmony, march toward death and not life.Losing something heightens our awareness and anxiety. Losing a phone captures this well. Lost in the midst of chaos-part of that chaos is not being god’s favorite or that God can use very human instruments-God leaves an opening-i will not make a full end-(Note for contemporary end of the worldists) So life and death are locked in constant tension-Perhaps we can look at the Incarnation of Jesus as another opening that God uses.Being lost in the sense of nowhere to turn, not being oriented the direction- (Boy Scouts and knowing north still did not help me if I did not know what direction to go) 9/11 chaos
While the Jeremiah text is clearly about national repentance, the stories of Jesus are about seeking out, search for an individual.Anxiety of seeking and anxiety of being the lost one Calvin would insist that we are already found.So god is not acting in economic rationality to chase after the one and possibly put the 99 in danger. Is It a waste of time and effort searching for the $50?
Looking foir a phone, or a credit card, or a checkbook.One could ask why bother with that amount of money? Why bother with one sheep and endanger possibly the 99? After all, it is but 1% of the flock.Instead of using Jeremiah’s tactic of scaring people in repentance, that did not work, Jesus goes at a different approach. He asks us to go outside of ourselves through the little stories and find ourselves in them. He emphasizes heaven joy instead of us grousing about the time and effort engaged for the lost.
Neither passage depicts a passive god. Both passages try to present a divine eye view of our circumstances. . This is an active responsive God. Jesus sees God as chasing after us to welcome us into the fold, not to punish.Jesus pictures god as being involved wiht individuals while at the smae time working toward the kngdom of heaven, the way of God in the world, the honoring of god’s realm.It breaks the divine heart to see what we do to each other, what we do to ourselves , our society when we ignore the way of god to make human life worth living in this time and place.could it be that God would feel a bit lost without us? I suspect that for God, nothing and no one is irretrievably lost. Nothing worth finding and saving will be lost.
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