Bible Study Discussion Guide Winter 2019 Trinity Church in the City of Boston Year C / Revised Common Lectionary, Lent 3: Sunday, March 24

Lent 3: Sunday, March 24

• Exodus 3:1-15
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
• Luke 13:1-9
• Psalm 63:1-8

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  In Acts 17 (not appointed for this week!), the Apostle Paul preaches a sermon to sophisticated and urbane Athenians about the God of the Jews:

   

  “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”

   

  The search for God, the groping for God, infuse our readings this week (“eagerly I seek you / my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you as in a barren and dry land where there is no water”). In Exodus, Moses encounters a God beyond any human effort to understand and evaluate, in the form of a burning-but-unconsumed bush. Moses’ question to God (essentially “tell me your name so that I can tell the others, and carry your authority plainly”) is confounded by God’s quixotic response: “I AM WHO I AM.” This is the God which medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas would later describe as “beyond every genus.” And yet this God is a God who beckons Moses to come closer, who promises to remain with him.

   

  Paul’s writing to the Corinthians about a God who will test them (but not beyond their “strength”) has given rise to a certain cliché that can strike many as inaccurate or experientially untrue (“God never gives you more than you can handle.”) While many do attribute pain and suffering to God’s “testing,” are we actually meant to understand God as a “tester”? If Jesus is love incarnate, revealing the true nature of God which is love (see Book of Common Prayer, p. 849), does such love actually engage in “testing”?  Or is the “testing” explanation our own (and even Paul’s) projection onto God of human reflexes and tendencies, in an effort to explain human pain and suffering? Is the “testing” explanation evidence of our own (and even Paul’s) discomfort with that suffering which can otherwise not be explained or rationalized if God is good and all-powerful?

   

  These timeless questions are taken up in Luke 13 this week. Were certain Galileans  – or victims of a tower collapsing in Siloam – killed because they were evil or sinful? Jesus dismisses such simplistic interpretations of human suffering, even as he reminds us that acknowledging our own capacity for sin – and repenting – is the path of new life out of death (“unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did”). Jesus’ answer to “some present” who are “groping after God” is that while God is not a vengeful or cruel God seeking our deaths, a kind of “death” does indeed come to those who reject God’s love. Jesus’ parable of the struggling fig tree (“let it alone for another year”) implies that whatever God may be, God’s nature – as shown in Christ – is love, forbearance and desire for human growth and flourishing.

   

• Of the various images of God present in the readings this week (burning bush, tester, gardener), which speaks to you most strongly. Why?