Ne 7:73-8:3, 5-6, 8-12
24 January 2010
“Holy Defiance”
Back in the 1980s, I was a member of the church where my mom still worships. There was a chorus we would sometimes sing. “The joy of the Lord is my strength / the joy of the Lord is my strength / the joy of the Lord is my strength / the joy of the Lord is my strength.” (It’s not terribly difficult to learn!) There are several variations in the following verses, but the one I especially remember is, “If you want joy, you must shout for it!”
I will admit it; it never was one of my favorite worship choruses. I guess it never seemed to say very much to me. It just seemed to be about stirring up warm fuzzy feelings. Still, I was able to utilize that chorus to, once again, display my ignorance. Talking with my mom one day, I used that phrase, “the joy of the Lord is my strength,” in referring to a relative of ours. I said that this person, not being Pentecostal, has no idea what that means.
By the way, guess what church this relative attended? Answer: the Presbyterian Church (USA). The Lord does have a sense of humor!
Having said all that, my wiser Pentecostal sisters and brothers could have told me back then that “the joy of the Lord” doesn’t consist of wonderful emotions. And that’s not the way it’s used in today’s text in Nehemiah. Something as fleeting as emotion, which can totally fade away in minutes, is a poor source of strength.
If there’s anyone in the scriptures who understands the truth of that, it would be Ezra and his associate, Nehemiah. Here’s some quick background on these guys. (By the way, in Hebrew, Ezra and Nehemiah are joined as one book.)
The Jewish exiles begin returning from Babylon in 538 B.C. This is made possible after the Persians conquer the Babylonians. After about eighty years, Ezra the priest leads a group back to the homeland. A few years later, Nehemiah returns. (So we’re somewhere in the mid-5th century B.C.) The walls of Jerusalem have not been rebuilt. When Nehemiah arrives, that’s the key part of his agenda. If the Jewish people have any hope of restoring themselves in unfriendly circumstances, they need that kind of protection.
We shouldn’t try to draw too sharp a line between the arenas that Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor inhabit. Their interests certainly overlap. Still, we can say that Ezra’s focus is a little more to the religious and Nehemiah’s to the political. To be sure, Nehemiah is installed by the Persians, but he takes advantage of whatever leeway they give.
By the time we get to today’s reading, the walls of
Jerusalem have been rebuilt. This
doesn’t please the local non-Jewish inhabitants; they aren’t exactly thrilled
to see this new construction—not to mention this new bunch moving in to what they’ve considered to be their land for
two or three generations.
This brings up another of Nehemiah’s chief concerns. And that is the question of mixed marriages—Jews
marrying Gentiles. That is what’s going
on in the background of verse 8. This is
where Ezra and the Levites read the law of Moses to the people. But it says “with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people
understood the reading.”
This is what Nehemiah talks about in chapter
13, when he says, “I
saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab; and half of their
children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of
Judah, but spoke the language of various peoples” (vv. 23-24). They are in danger of losing their identity,
their culture.
Notice an approach Nehemiah takes: “I contended with them and cursed them and
beat some of them and pulled out their hair” (v. 25). Never let it be said of Nehemiah that he
doesn’t take matters into his own hands!
As for Ezra, in the part of the book named for him, when he discovers
what’s been going on, he has a similar idea, but with a twist. “When I heard this, I tore my garment and my
mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled” (Ezra 9:3). I suppose I’ll let you decide if either of
those techniques would be effective!
To be honest, there is another, less sinister,
reason why the people would need the scriptures translated. By this time, Aramaic has become the common
language throughout the Middle East; there are even some places in the Bible
where it appears. Most people will speak
one of its dialects until the New Testament era. Aramaic is the language spoken by Jesus.
Let’s try to picture what’s going on in Nehemiah
8. We have Ezra in front of the people,
reading the law to them. Verse 3 says
that this goes on “from early morning until midday.” Surely the people have been ordered to show up for this lengthy
recital. Who wants to spend their entire
morning listening to the word of God? Apparently,
they do. We learn in verse 1 that the whole thing was
their idea.
So, what’s the result? Weeping.
The people aren’t crying because Ezra has bored them to death; they feel
the bittersweet emotions dredged up by hearing the word of God. They grieve the loss of what once was. They mourn the loss of Jerusalem’s former
glory. They have been bereaved.
I think that’s something we all, to one extent or
another, can identify with. We all have
had losses. Sometimes it’s something we can’t quite put our finger on. It’s something like…the loss of a dream, a
path not chosen. Sometimes it’s
something that has been taken from us. The
people feel that, and they weep.
What do Ezra and Nehemiah—guys who on other
occasions have taken hold of hair—what do they do here? They take hold of the situation. They tell the people gathered together, “This
day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep” (v. 9). In fact, they do more than that. Not simply a time to refrain from weeping,
this is a time for joy!
According to verse 10, the people are told, “Go
your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those
for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be
grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” We’ve all done plenty of mourning—now it’s
time to party! And everyone’s
invited—even those who don’t have anything!
“Go home and have a feast. Share your food and wine with those who don’t
have enough” (GNB). Can you imagine what the church would be like if we
had this kind of overflowing generosity?
This is a picture of the joy of the Lord. Still, it is easy to get confused about what
joy entails.
“Many people link [joy],” says Dan
Clendenin, “with happiness and the enhancement of their circumstances—health,
success, fame, wealth, pleasure, fun, or good fortune. In that sense of the word, joy is derivative,
attached to and dependent upon some external source. Joy of that sort can exude a sense of
smugness, entitlement, narcissism, and even self-pity in the absence of desired
objects.”[1]
That is a twisted notion of joy. It’s not the picture of joy we have in the
Bible, which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit—a pure gift of grace. Joy, as Nehemiah portrays it, runs against
the world’s way of doing things. It is
counter-cultural; it is subversive. As
Clendenin notes, it “[does] not yield to the spirit of despair. [It does] not default to gloom and doom…It is
a divine gift to receive rather than a selfish goal to pursue.”[2]
How do we explain the statement, “the
joy of the Lord is your strength”? How does
joy give us strength?
I’ll give a rather extreme example to
make the point. Harry Emerson Fosdick,
who I mentioned in my last sermon, speaks of Christians who “have such a joyful
faith in the divine that their gladness about the whole of life redeems their
sorrow about its details.”[3] He mentions the 17th century Scottish
Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford, who got into some trouble with the
Anglicans. From prison he said, “Jesus
Christ came into my room last night and every stone flashed like a ruby.” (Now that’s the joy of the Lord!)
Simple happiness, mere emotion,
positive mental attitude: that’s not
enough to sustain us when life whacks us with a two-by-four.
What about the line, “This is the day
that the Lord has made,” which appears not only in scripture (Ps 118:24), but
also in a number of songs? At our
previous church, we would sometimes sing a song by the Zoe Group, “A New
Anointing.” They sing a cappella, and that line appears twice
in the chorus.
This is the
day that the Lord has made. It wasn’t
until we sang that song that something dawned on me. Until then, I had associated that phrase with
something I mentioned at the beginning:
warm, fuzzy feelings. But now, it
seemed to strike a bold chord. That
phrase, and the one in today’s text (“this day is holy to our Lord”) is a note of
holy defiance.
Has today
brought earthquakes? Terrorism? Disease?
Domestic violence? Has it brought
any number of ways of suffering?
According to the scriptures, that stuff isn’t allowed to have the final
say. This day is holy to our Lord. Let the devil and hell and fear and bigotry
and cowardice do their worst. This is
the day that the Lord has made.
“And all the people went their way to eat and drink
and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood
the words that were declared to them” (v. 12).
The joy of the Lord has given them the strength to not keep it bottled
up, but to set it free.