Week 02–community

This Week’s Reading:

Following their transformation from captive slaves to a free nation, Israel spent a year at Mount Sinai, struggling to understand what it meant to be YHWH’s community–His priestly partners to mediate the renewal of all of creation. Israel failed the terms of the partnership time and time again, until YHWH eventually declared the covenant broken, the relationship failed, and once again exiled his chosen ones from the place of His Presence. Yet, through his prophets, he promised that He would remain faithful to the promise he made to Israel’s forefathers–in spite of Israel’s faithlessness (2 Tim. 2.13). He would make a new covenant, whose glory would fill up the old one, and even eclipse it.

Enter Jesus, going up on a mountain like Moses, sitting down to teach like Moses, and giving the torah, or God’s teaching, just like Moses. Except this time, he identifies all the people that will inherit Abraham’s promise as the poor, weeping, powerless, oppressed, merciful, pure, peacemaking, and afflicted ones, (Is. 49). Jesus confronts Israel’s own powerful vision of conquest with the beating heart of the Sinai covenant: self-giving love that shines like a lighthouse from God’s holy mountain, guiding all nations of the earth home. 

Central to this manifesto for being God’s community is clarification of the kind of worship YHWH desires–generosity, prayer, and self-denial offered for the right reasons. At the center of this central section is a simple, (and highly sophisticated) prayer pleading for heaven to come to earth through this community. God’s people are to be an assembly, or ekklesia (church) where heaven overlaps with earth, bringing forth the fruit of God’s Spirit (7.20).