Ash Wednesday
Joel
2:12-19
3/2/22
“Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy
mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the
LORD is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds
and thick darkness!” That is how the
prophet Joel described the situation in the prior chapter.
He
declares that the Day of the Lord is coming – it is near. There was an army
approaching. But this was not an army of soldiers and chariots. Instead, it was a plague of locusts.
In the first chapter Joel had said, “What the cutting
locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust
left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust
left, the destroying locust has eaten.”
Like an army, they were devastating the land. The prophet says, “For a nation has come
up against my land, powerful and beyond number; its teeth are lions'
teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vine and
splintered my fig tree; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down;
their branches are made white.”
Locust plagues were part of life in the Near Eastern world. They
happened from time to time. But the prophet’s words make it clear that this was
no random event. Instead, it was the
“day of the Lord.” It was an act of
judgment by Yahweh against Israel. We
don’t learn any specific information about what Israel had done. But based on what we know from elsewhere in
the Old Testament it seems all but certain that this was God’s punishment for
idolatry – worshipping the false gods of the surrounding peoples.
Up until our text, Joel has spoken about the destruction being
brought by the locusts and how it is the day of the Lord drawing near. But in our text, God offers a word of hope
through the prophet. He says, “‘Yet even
now,’ declares the LORD, ‘return to me with all your heart, with
fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and
not your garments.”
Yahweh calls Israel to repentance – to genuine confession of
their sin. It is not enough just to go
through the motions. He says, “rend your
hearts and not your garments.” But
in our text God does not simply tell Israel to repent. He tells them why there is hope in
repentance. There is hope because of the
very character of their God. We hear, “Return
to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”
This is a kind of “creedal statement” in the Old Testament that
is repeated again and again. Many people
like to describe “the God of the Old Testament” as an angry and wrathful God.
But instead, this is what God reveals about himself.
He is gracious and merciful – he wants to give his people what
they don’t deserve, and he wants to help them.
He is slow to anger. God is not
One who is ready to “go off” at the first provocation. And he is abounding in steadfast love. As the apostle John tells us, God is
love. This truth that God is defined by
love is emphasized in Psalm 136 where the refrain in the second half of every
verse is: “for his steadfast love endures forever.”
This is what God is like. And that is why he says in our text, “Yet
even now return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and
with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” He calls his people to repentance because he is
the gracious, merciful, and loving God who forgives – who relents over
disaster.
We learn in our text that the people responded to the Word of the
Lord. There was another call for the trumpet to be blown. But this was not a
sound of warning about impending doom.
Instead, it was a call for all the people to gather in repentance. We
hear, “Blow the trumpet in Zion; consecrate a fast; call a solemn
assembly; gather the people. Consecrate the congregation; assemble the
elders; gather the children, even nursing infants. Let the bridegroom
leave his room, and the bride her chamber.” The priests were called to weep at
the temple and confess, “Spare your people, O LORD, and make not your heritage
a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the
peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”
On this Ash Wednesday we are entering into the season of Lent.
Although we are always called to repent, this is a time in the life of the
Church when we place a special emphasis on repentance. We examine our lives and confess those things
and ways by which God take second place.
We confess the ways that we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. We
confess the ways we have coveted, lusted, and hated. We confess the ways that
we have harmed our neighbor’s reputation.
We do this during the season of Lent as a preparation for Holy
Week. God has not changed. He is still
the God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love. He expressed this in the Old
Testament through the prophets as he shared his intention to act in a way that
would provide forgiveness to all people.
In our Gospel lesson this past Sunday we heard Jesus say,
“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written
about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will
be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully
treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him,
and on the third day he will rise.”
We prepare during Lent to observe again the remembrance of the
passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. At
Christmas we celebrated the fact that God sent his Son into the world as he was
conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. Jesus Christ, who is true God and true man,
was Emmanuel – God with us – as he lived in this world as one of us without
ceasing to be God.
During Epiphany we saw that Jesus the sinless One was baptized
by John the Baptist as he received a baptism of repentance. The Spirit of God descended like a dove and
came to rest on him, and God the Father said, “This is my beloved
Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
God identified Jesus as the Servant of the Lord – as the suffering
Servant who would bear the sins of all.
Our Lord went to Jerusalem to be mocked, and scourged, and
crucified. Yet while he endured this
physical suffering and humiliation for us, it was but a sign of the true depths
of his agony. In the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed, “My Father, if it be
possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but
as you will.” Jesus had come to drink
the cup of God’s wrath against our sin.
St. Paul put this in stark terms when he wrote, “For our sake he made him to be sin who
knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Jesus
Christ died on the cross as the sacrifice who received God’s judgment – his punishment,
his damnation that we deserve because of our sins. By his death, he has redeemed us – he has
freed us from sin. But God wasn’t done. Lent prepares us for Holy Week. At the
end of the that week, Jesus’ dead body was buried in a tomb. But Holy Week
leads to Easter, for just as Jesus Christ had told his disciples, on the third
day God raised Jesus from the dead.
On Good
Friday it looked like God had rejected Jesus.
But as Paul told the Romans, he “was declared to be the Son of
God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from
the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” God vindicated Jesus as the Christ who had
fulfilled the Scriptures and won for us the forgiveness of sins. And in the
resurrection of Jesus, God defeated death.
In the resurrection of Jesus, he began the resurrection of the Last Day
that will be ours as well when he returns in glory.
Lent is a
time when we consider the sin in our life.
We do not seek to excuse it, or minimize it, or ignore it. Instead, we confess it. We listen to God’s
words through the prophet Joel, “Yet even now return to me with all your heart, with
fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and
not your garments.”
Joel assured the people of Israel that they could repent and
turn to God, “for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love.” We are able to so for
the same reason. It is still true, and
now we have seen it revealed in the most amazing way.
We have seen God send his Son into the world in order to suffer
and die for our sins to give us forgiveness.
We have seen God raise Jesus Christ on Easter, as he defeated death and
gave us the hope of eternal life with him. We repent and confess our sins confident
that because of Jesus Christ, God forgives us, loves us, and gives us eternal
life with him.
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