|
The Human Nature of Nations Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 4, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ezekiel 17:22-24; 31:1-12 Mark 4:31-34
On the Fourth of July and the first day of the week, when, as citizens, we celebrate the founding of a nation while, as followers of Jesus Christ, we celebrate the supper instituted on the night before the Lord of Life was arrested and executed by the state, how are we to understand the nature of the nation-state in relation to the purposes of God in human history? “Consider Assyria, a cedar of Lebanon,” begins the sixth century prophet Ezekiel, prompting Reinhold Niebuhr—some 2500 years later--to consider the paradoxical perils of victory for the allied nations, post World War II, in light of the word of the Lord spoken by Ezekiel on June 21, 587 B.C. to Pharaoh, King of Egypt and his hordes. At first and for the next seven verses, Ezekiel lauds Assyria, a nation “…with fair branches and forest shade, and of great height, its top among the clouds.” We almost can imagine the Egyptians nodding in agreement while thinking themselves presently in the same proud position that Assyria had occupied before Egypt and Babylon appeared on the horizon of history. Truth be told, we nod in recognition ourselves, thinking our nation to be a great nation—perhaps the greatest? As such, Assyria was a blessing to other nations, says the Lord, implying that the creator of the heavens and the earth was not categorically opposed to superpowers, even pagan superpowers. [Jenson] “I made it beautiful, with its mass of branches, the envy of all the trees in Eden that were in the garden of God.” How are we to understand the nature of the nation-state in relation to the purposes of God in human history? Surely, now and again, nations have their place in what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human. But because at the end of the day a nation is an aggregate of flawed human beings, nations partake of human frailties, frailties that often mask themselves in might. At issue in the 31st chapter of Ezekiel is Egypt’s overblown sense of itself. Approaching her hubris by indirection, Ezekiel invites the Pharaoh and his hordes to consider Assyria, whose pride in itself—as if by godly design—has begotten envy in other nations. Or to coin a phrase from Niebuhr’s theological perspective: Assyria’s sin of pride is about to go before her fall. “Therefore,” says the Lord, “because [Assyria] towered high and set its top among the clouds, and its heart was proud of its height, I gave it into the hand of the prince of the nations.” Assyria’s fall from power is likened to the fall of a mighty cedar of Lebanon: foreigners from terrible nations have cut it down; its branches and boughs lie broken, birds settling on its fallen trunk and wild animals lodging among its broken boughs. “Which among the trees of Eden was like you in glory and in greatness?” asks Ezekiel of Pharaoh and his horde of what must now be enraged Egyptians. “Now you shall be brought down with the trees of Eden to the world below; you shall be among the uncircumcised, with those who are killed by the sword.” Lest Pharaoh miss the prophet’s point, Ezekiel adds: “This is Pharaoh and all his horde, says the Lord God.” The human nature of nations, like our own human nature, is prone to pride, a pride that prompted most every prophet in the Old Testament to rail against nations’ denial of their own shortcomings and weaknesses, to judge nations’ ingratitude toward the giver of the gift of life as blasphemous, and to expose as a lie the claim that a nation’s power and position were wholly the product of human achievement. Centuries later, Paul joined the prophets, counseling mortals and nations “‘not to think more highly of themselves than they ought.’ These warnings,” writes Niebuhr, “express the uneasiness of the human soul, when informed by a profound faith, over the tendency of [mortals] to hide their weakness by a false show of strength; or to forget their limitations in their knowledge of their real, yet always limited strength.” Pride, in the first place, marks the human nature of nations. This nation is no exception. In the second place, the human nature of nations is made manifest in the sin that crouches in a nation’s highest aspirations and deeds. From the altitude of our ideals, our moral superiority, our material success, our power and might, we are most prone to fall as individuals and collectively as nations. To wit, the very things that were best about Assyria became the occasion of her downfall. According to Adam Watson in his study of the evolution of international society, Assyria (whose power as an imperial state lasted about as long as the Roman Empire in the west or from Columbus to the present in the so-called new world) lessened local warfare, brought new goods and economic opportunities to previously isolated communities, made possible a higher standard of living for a larger population and left territories such as Egypt and Babylon relatively free. But in the end, the very states that had benefited from Assyrian rule turned on her and laid her low. She did not see it coming! Put another way, in our finest hour, we turn a blind eye to our weaknesses and our failings. Therefore with Ezekiel’s 31st chapter before him in the aftermath of World War II, Niebuhr found himself thinking of the allies’ noble plans to “rebuild the defeated nations as democracies ‘from the ground up.’” “…this confidence in our ability to create something better by our fiat,” he wrote, “…is not made any more sufferable by the idea that we are doing all this for the sake of ‘purging’ the defeated nations of their evil and bestowing our ‘democracy’ on them. The very absurdity of bestowing democracy by the will of the conqueror contains the pretension against which the prophets inveighed.” When will we ever learn? “Sin is lurking at the door,” said God to Cain on the night before he murdered Abel. “Its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Instead nations think themselves masters of the universe as our brothers’ blood cries out to God from the ground. The human nature of nations makes them, makes us as citizens, blind to the sin that lurks at the door, particularly when that sin hides in our highest ideals and aspirations. In the third place, the human nature of nations is revealed in its inability to imagine its own mortality. There is bite to this prophetic announcement of future judgment in Ezekiel’s 31st chapter, notes Robert Jenson, “for nations, despite all the evidence, generally suppose themselves immortal. Americans can conceive and fear a period of American decline or defeat, but cannot conceive a world from which the United States has simply disappeared,” Jenson writes. “But there are no immortal nations, says the Lord: if creation itself last so long, the United States—and Britain and France and China—will someday be one with Assyria and Babylon.” The human nature of nations finds its citizens unable to imagine the day when the nation will no longer be: when there will be no United States of America. Now lest you think I am taking the occasion of a national holiday to rain on the endearing parades that soon will fill the streets of every small town or to douse the fireworks that will cause us to cheer at the end of the day, know that what I have just proclaimed to you is nothing but good news! The gospel for today is that nations are not gods; that states are not meant to save us; that countries are like unto human beings: prideful, blind to their own failings, mortal. The gospel is that God alone is God! Therefore the words of the prophet, lo these 2597 years later, mean still to turn God’s people from the worship of nations to the worship of God who, in the words of the psalmist, “brings the counsel of the nations to nothing.” According to our text from Ezekiel’s 17th chapter, a chapter also dominated by the image of the cedars of Lebanon, to be God is to “bring low the high tree” and “make high the low tree”; to “dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.” The relation of the nation-state to the purposes of God in human history?: “this God simply is the one who reverses the judgments and outcomes of this age” because “reversal of what otherwise might be the order of things,” says Jenson of our text, “belongs to [God’s] reality in himself.” That is to say, God’s reality in himself for us is the reversal who is Jesus and in whom “the last has become first and the first last.” In Mary’s son, nations have to do with the living God who casts down the mighty from their thrones [though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness] and raises up those of low degree [And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him]. So it was that when Jesus himself considered the hope of the nation into which he was born in relation to God’s purposes in human history and in relation to the kingdom of God’s reign, when he decided to preach a two verse sermon on the prophetic words of Ezekiel’s 17th chapter, he chose the image of a lowly garden herb, an annual rather than a perennial, a seed of insignificance. Contrary to the cedar of Lebanon in whose branches birds of every kind would nest, unlike the nation of God’s chosen people whose hope had them destined, in the imaginations of their hearts, for dominance, the refuge afforded God’s people by the kingdom would be a modest shrub. To those invested in Israel’s present political aspirations and to those who had no future and no prospect of one, Jesus’ words must have sounded like an invitation to take “a leaky, short-masted, poorly provisioned frigate for the new world, on the condition that they would welcome aboard all and sundry who wanted to go and face the prospect of an endless voyage at sea.” wrote New Testament professor Robert Funk. “There were few,” he said, “even among the destitute, who were desperate enough to set out. Such is the power of the old hope that besets the human breast.” But for those who quit the worship of their nation’s ascendancy or left behind the outcast existence of the so-called unrighteous for life with an itinerate teacher who would soon be arrested and executed by the unholy alliance of church and state, there was the gift of a freedom few human beings glimpse this side of the grave. No longer under the thrall of princes or principalities or high-handed principles, but in the company of a person, a human being in whom they beheld their own humanity redeemed, they would come to love with a light touch the things of this earth because they would no longer need them to be what they were not: love spouse, partner, family, child, friend, possessions, church, nation, life itself because each is limited, partial, fragile, mortal, flawed. Put another way, in his company they would be set free to love God alone with all of their heart and mind and soul and strength. On this day when we celebrate the birth of a nation founded by pilgrims who heeded God’s invitation and boarded a leaky, short-masted, poorly provisioned frigate for the new world, on the condition that they would welcome aboard all and sundry who wanted to go, may we love this land of the free and home of the brave as we ought, because we love God more. |