Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)
Readings – Ezra 3: 1–13; Ephesians 2: 11–22
“And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto the Lord; ‘because he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever…’”
Tonight’s Old Testament lesson is one of those ones that can make little sense when we hear it read. It can seem to be a confusing mass of difficult names, of Shealtiels, Zerubbabels, and Jozadaks. So, let me explain what it’s all about, and why it matters today.
The return from exile is depicted in this woodcut for Die Bibel in Bildern, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.
The story comes from the Restoration of Temple in Jerusalem, seventy years after its destruction by the Babylonians. This architectural wonder of Hebrew culture and civilisation, built by King Solomon, full of beautiful art and craftsmanship, had been looted and then razed. Jerusalem was intentionally destroyed, and its citizens were deported to hundreds of miles across the desert to Babylon.
For long decades afterwards, the idea that the Temple would be restored must have seemed like a pipe-dream. Then, however, the political situation changed. The Persians became the new great power in the Middle East, and under Cyrus the Great they swept away the Babylonians and allowed the many nations kept in bondage in their mighty capital to return to their homelands. Among them were the exiles from Jerusalem.
The portion of the Book of Ezra we heard from this evening records the restoration of the Temple from its modest beginnings, when Jews first re-gathered on the ruined foundations of Solomon’s Temple, meeting in fear of the people of the neighbouring lands despite their sponsorship by their new friends, the Persian imperial authorities. Then it outlines how, through hard-work and sacrifice, the means were found to lay a foundation stone for the new Temple. There were even some elderly people present when it was laid who remembered King Solomon’s one before its destruction.
What did they people do when the foundation stone of the new Temple was laid? They praised God; they praised God in music and praised God at the top of their voices; they praised God because ‘his mercy endureth forever.’
Interestingly, there is no sense of complaint here about the Exile. The Bible always presents the Exile as being entirely the fault of the Hebrews themselves, the inevitable consequence of generations of poor political and religious leadership, of decadence and corruption and faithlessness. Nothing human lasts forever; our best laid plans often go wrong. Our achievements depend entirely on the grace of God. This isn’t a lesson that we in our present Western culture, with its individualism and self-confidence in its technological prowess find easy to hear.
After the events in tonight’s Old Testament lesson, the Hebrews would have a long period of peace under their Persian protectors, where they were free to praise God without fear, albeit they were never restored to the sovereignty and independence of their glory days. Then, around two hundred years later, a brilliant and vaultingly ambitious young man named Alexander would erupt from the north and sweep the Persians away as they had once swept the Babylonians. Following that came a long time of troubles, lasting for centuries. During this time, God was praised faithfully day-by-day in the Temple but human failings remained unchanged; those praising God at the Temple certainly were not exempted from those failings. Our best laid plans often go wrong; our achievements depend entirely on the grace of God
In Jesus Christ, God provided a rescue plan for the human race. Yet even those who embraced Christ as God-made-human and saviour of the world remained as flawed as people always have been. In tonight’s New Testament lesson, St Paul writes to the Church at Ephesus at the dawn of Christianity, when it was beset by divisions between Jews and Gentiles, between those who thought circumcision was an essential mark of a follower of God, and those who thought it was a humiliating irrelevance.
These debates seem obscure to us now: but pause and think about them for a moment, and it soon becomes obvious that they are related an issue that still causes deep divisions in today’s Church and secular society alike – identity.
That is worth bearing in mind at a time when many of us find ourselves wondering whether anything that we have treasured, especially in the Church, will last. The Church of England seems beset by divisions, as do many branches of the Church, on many continents. The divisions of a bitterly contentious secular world seem to be imported into the Church without being softened at all — but that has usually been the case in the past too.
One thing that is distinctive to Christians should unite all of us, even those who are so profoundly in disagreement that they struggle to recognise one another as Christians at all — that is the Cross. The symbol of our failures and humanity’s collective failure; the symbol our best intentions inevitably going wrong; a symbol, indeed, of great cruelty and violence, is transformed by God’s love into the means of bringing us to eternal life. We are brought close to God and to one another not by our own efforts, but through the blood of Christ shed on the Cross to pay the price for the sins of the world. Christ’s sacrifice is satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, for the sins of us and those whom we love and for the sins of those whom, frankly, we find hard not to hate.
A challenging message, but also a liberating one. For we know that our best laid plans often go wrong. We are saved not by our own efforts but by God’s grace – a grace poured out for us through Christ’s saving work on the Cross. In a culture which demands that we try to be the solution to every problem, this frees us from tormenting ourselves for not having all the answers. It frees us from the need to always be right, and from the need to pretend that we always know what the right answer to problems is.
It frees us then to worry less about what we achieve and instead simply to delight in praising God; to praise God in music and praise God at the top of our voices; to praise God because ‘his mercy endureth forever’, to His children of every nation and every age from the times of Zerubbabel and Jozadak to our own age.
So to God be the glory, the Father who made us, the Son who saved us, the Holy Spirit who breathes live into us, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top photo – the last surviving part of the Second Temple, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. 21 November 2022, © Gerry Lynch.
