Then the Lord said to Moses, “Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. You are to worship at a distance, but Moses alone is to approach the Lord; the others must not come near. And the people may not come up with him.”

When Moses went and told the people all the Lord’s words and laws, they responded with one voice, “Everything the Lord has said we will do.” Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said.

He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.”

Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank. The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and stay here, and I will give you the tablets of stone with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction.”

Matthew 22:34-39

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’

Sermon

Recently I’ve been going through some boxes of family memorabilia: photos, letters, certificates going back generations. I’m putting the interesting ones in albums for our children and grandchildren. Like my grandmother’s ration cards from the 1940s; my great-uncle in a crew of thirteen squeezed onto an 18-footer on Sydney Harbour in the 1920s – not a lifejacket in sight; poignant letters from the Western Front and funny photos of young people in fancy dress. I enjoyed getting some new insights into my parents, grandparents and great grandparents seeing them as young adults growing up in a very different Australia.

When we learn about somebody’s background it helps us understand the person better. It’s like that with Jesus. We need to know the Old Testament to better appreciate and know Jesus. It’s his family album. Our Advent series is an Overview of the Bible focussing on God’s four promise-making events and how these promises were fulfilled ultimately in Jesus. Last week we saw how God called Abraham and Sarah to trust him, trust being the foundation of all relationships. He promised them that the whole human race would be blessed through their descendants.

1: Today’s reading, Exodus 24, is rather strange with blood being splashed around and people being entertained by God up in the clouds. Stranger still is for me to tell you that it is describing the marriage between God and Israel… metaphorically speaking God was the groom and the Twelve Tribes descended form Abraham and Sarah were the Bride.

What do you need for a marriage? A venue, both sides make promises to each other, a symbol of the promise, witnesses, a marriage certificate, a celebration meal.

In today’s reading:

• The venue for the marriage ceremony was the foot of Mt Horeb in the Sinai Peninsula
• The venue for the celebration meal was the top of Mt Horeb: The guests were seventy elders
• The consent was made by all the people
• The solemnisation of the wedding was through the splashing of bull’s blood on the altar that represented God and then on the heads of all the people of the Twelve Tribes of Israel
• the marriage certificate was written on two stone tablets which were stored in a large box and kept in a tent. What do we call that wedding certificate of God and his People? The Ten Commandments is a bit of a misnomer. It was first and foremost a statement of God’s love for his people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, including rescuing them form Egypt and sharing with them the intimate name he gave them to call him by: Yahweh (the L.O.R.D.)  Second come the ten rules: the “You shalls” and the “You shall nots”.

2: At the time of their wedding to the Lord the raggle-taggle Twelve Tribes became the nation of Israel. It was a strange type of nation. It had no king, no capital, no parliament, no armed forces. Its only central focus was the ark of the covenant in the tabernacle or tent which moved around to various locations. And there was a public service: the priesthood. The priesthood’s job was to uphold God’s Law and teach it to the People as well as performing various ritual sacrifices and offerings.

 Sadly, the Old Testament is mostly a sad chronicle of the marriage problems between the LORD God and Israel, which culminated the People being taken into Exile and the disappearance of the symbol of their marriage to God and their nationhood, that storage box we call the Ark of the Covenant.

3: When Jesus came, he dealt with the marriage problems in radical ways:

First there was the problem of legalism. The joy had gone out of the marriage, and it had deteriorated to obsessive rule-keeping (Look at the second reading Matthew 22:34-39) The pharisees wanted to trap Jesus so they asked him the famous question “Which is the greatest commandment?”  In their minds keeping the Sabbath holy was the most important commandment and they were very upset that Jesus had challenged them about this by deliberately healing people on the sabbath. So, Jesus answered not by picking one of the Ten Commandments which were a statement of the letter of the law, but dug down to the spirit of the law, declaring the greatest commandments “Love God…”  and a close second was “love your neighbour…” Moreover, he blew apart the narrow idea of “neighbour” by telling the story of the Good Samaritan.

The second marriage problem was the childish thinking about punishment/reward. It goes back to Moses pronouncing the blessings that came for keeping God’s Law and the curses that resulted from transgressing the Law.  When Jesus’ disciples saw someone crippled from birth, they asked Jesus “Who had sinned the crippled man or his parents.” Jesus’s answer was “Neither!” and he promptly healed the poor man who had spent a life of not only disability but unnecessary guilt.

The third marriage problem was the fossilisation of the relationship. The priesthood and priestly system of sacrifices had become a money-making concern for the entitled priestly caste. Jesus replaced the whole system. He atoned for sins by his once-and-for-all sacrifice of himself on the cross.

 Takeaways:

As New Testament people our relationship with God is a type of marriage: founded on love, formalised by promises and expressed through total commitment. It’s personal but also corporate. We the Church, you and me and everyone else who loves Jesus, are married to him.

How do wedding vows go “We love, honour and cherish him…for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for better, for worse.” And Jesus is committed to “loving, honouring and cherishing us…no matter what…but not “until our life’s end” but for all eternity.

When we as a church participate in the holy communion today service today let us take time to think of it as renewing our wedding vows to Jesus.