We began this series of weekly updates with a vision of a marvelous creation (Genesis 1 and 2) in which God was living in right relationship with all of God's creation (humans, animals and creation itself); and all of creation (humans, animals and creation itself) were living in right relationship with God and with one another. This good creation was disrupted by humanity's self-centeredness and refusal to listen to the will of a creating and loving God.
The story continued with a vision of God's efforts to restore the marvelous balance and relationships which were the intent of God's creative work. We watched God work with Abram (through which God promised to bring about the restoration of the good creation), with King David (from whose lineage God promised a new king would come) and ultimately with King Cyrus of Persia who restored Israel (after her exile) in order that the promise might be fulfilled.
What we might wish for at this moment in the story (the last 500 years before the birth of Jesus) was that the nation of Israel would realize its calling and set its mind and will to the task of working with God to restore the creation. Unfortunately this is not what happened. The trauma of loss (of its freedom and sense of invulnerability) made the people of Israel grow inward rather than reach outward. The leadership of the nation believed the only way to maintain its identity as a distinct people of God was to erect higher and higher walls in order to be separate from the peoples around them.
We see this in the two books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These twin books (they are in fact one story in two parts) tell of the amazing and heroic return of the God's people to the land. We can read of the bravery of ordinary men and women who stood against immense pressure to give up the quest to restore Israel. The dark side of this return however was that the leadership did everything it could to insulate the Jewish people from the people who loved around them. This even took the form of having Jewish men who had married foreign women during the exile divorce their wives and commit to never again marry outside the faith.
It was during this time as well that the party known as Pharisees had its beginnings (though it would only take final shape in the time of Jesus). The Pharisees were those who believed that one way to insure the separateness of the Jewish people was by keeping the laws of God in minute detail. They were not legalists as such, but they were determined to maintain the integrity of the Jewish people at all cost. This desire for separateness meant that the promise of God to restore creation was held captive because of the fear of outsiders. In fact even the vision of this restoration was lost and replaced with a vision of restoring Israel only…a fact with which Jesus would have to contend.
The challenge before us a renewed people of God in Christ, is to never hold the promise hostage. Our calling is to usher the promise into the world in order that the world might be slowly, but surely redeemed. Granted none of us can complete this task of restoration, only God can do that. None-the-less we are baptized into the body of Christ in order that we might be co-workers in Christ to restore what humanity rent apart. So any vision to which we ought to conform our lives should be one that sets the promise free, rather than one that holds it tightly for as if it is our possession and not God's promise for the world.
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