The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
February 28th, 2021
Lent II (B): Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
One of the most fascinating obituaries I have ever read was for a Japanese man named Hiroo Onoda. Now some of you may recognize his name and know his story, but I did not. And I was flabbergasted. You see, Lieutenant Onoda was an Imperial Japanese Army officer in World War II. Late in 1944 he was sent to a remote island in the Philippines to live in the jungle and sabotage the enemy. As American forces closed in in early 1945, and many Japanese officers were fleeing, his commanding officer told him to “stay and fight.” “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you,” the officer promised.[1] So Lt. Onoda did exactly that. He stayed and fought. For 29 more years!! For 29 years he believed he was still in combat and he lived in the jungle fighting a guerilla war. He dismissed leaflets dropped from American planes declaring the end of the war as sneaky propaganda. He evaded search parties by hiding out in the thick jungle. He refused to believe anyone who tried to convince him the war was over. He was eventually declared dead in 1959. It wasn’t until an adventurous Japanese student went looking for him and found him in 1974, that his commanding officer was contacted, flown in, and stood before him and to relinquish him of his duty. Lt. Onoda reportedly saluted and wept.
Setting aside the complicated ethical questions of Lt. Onoda’s actions (he reportedly killed 30 people during his thirty-year war, killings for which he was pardoned given that he thought he was still in battle) and leaving for a moment the questions of how he survived in the jungle for all those years, the main question this story makes me ask is this: Was Lt. Onoda a hero or a fool? Depending on how you hold his story up to the light it is either an epic tale of survival and bravery, or a farce. Was he a patriot or an idiot?
How you answer that question depends a lot on what you think about promises. How binding, how lasting are they? We make promises, agreements, vows between two parties all the time—in marriage, in work, in life. It’s commitment to those promises and trust in them that allows human interaction to proceed. But do you really expect people to keep their promises all the time? Lt. Onoda certainly did. It’s part of what made his such an object of fascination. He seemed not to have gotten the memo that despite their best intentions, people do break their promises. In big ways and small ways, we fail to honor our agreements. Most of the time it’s not intentional. We don’t break them because we’re bad people, we break them because we’re people. We break them because we are unreliable, imperfect, forgetful, fickle, distracted or for other reasons which are out of our control. And because of this, most people take promises with a certain level of doubt built in. Or they desire some back up, like collateral or written assurance. That’s why contracts exist. We have learned, over time, through other’s actions and our own, that we will break our promises to one another.
The Biblical word for what I am talking about—promises, vows, agreements—is covenant. But in the Bible it is usually used to talk about God’s commitment, God’s promise, to His people. Our readings in this season of Lent are laden with covenantal language. Last week God was making his covenant with Noah, about never again sending a flood to destroy the earth. Next week we’ll have the 10 commandments, God’s covenant with Moses and the people of Israel in the wilderness. And today, as we always hear in the second Sunday in Lent, we have God’s covenant with Abraham. The covenant that, if Abraham will walk before God and be blameless, God will make him exceedingly numerous, the father of many nations. “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you, throughout all generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” This is God’s promise—to be God to you, and, by as heirs of Abraham through faith, as Paul puts it, to be God to us.
However, there is a tension that coalesces around this theme of covenant in our scriptures, a tension that serves as the source of the drama through both the Old Testament and the New. And the tension is this: will God uphold His end of the covenant? Can God do what God says God will do? To stick with us, to be God to us—is that really an everlasting covenant? And I would suggest, that the reason this question exists in the minds of the people, is not because of how God has failed to honor his commitment, but because of how we fail to honor commitments to one another. We are so used to people breaking covenants, large and small, that we’ve been conditioned to a certain level of skepticism when it comes to promises. So, it’s only natural that that skepticism would influence our understanding of God’s promises as well. Our inability to keep our covenants leads us to question whether God will keep His covenant with us. And so, even though this is God we’re talking about, we often doubt that he’ll come through. This is the tension—the vacillation between our faith in and our doubt of God’s promise—that propels the story of salvation from Abraham, to the desert, to the Exile, all the way to the cross. Because the cross, once again, poses the question: will God come through?
Let me explain what I mean. In our Gospel passage this morning from the 8th chapter of Mark, we get the first of three instances in which Jesus tries to explain to his disciples what lies ahead for him: suffering, rejection, death, but then, after three days, resurrection. He said all this quite openly, we are told. Even so, the disciples don’t understand. But Jesus is crystal clear: this is the plan, this is the promise, the way God will be God to him, even in the darkness of the grave. And yet, in chapter 15 of Mark, as Jesus hangs from the cross, suffocating under the agony of his torture, he famously cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He seems to be saying, “Where are you, God? You said you’d be here. Can you do what you said, what I said, you were going to do?” It is a resurfacing of that same tension that was woven through the Old Testament. The promise is in jeopardy—yet again. Will God uphold His end of the covenant? Can God do what God said God would do? It reads like a moment of despair, of doubt even. And coming from the lips of our Lord, it is especially chilling. Has the one who enjoyed such intimacy with God that he could say they were one being, been so colored by the covenantal inconstancy of his fellow men, all of whom betrayed their agreement to stand by him to the end, that he now feels forgotten, forsaken, abandoned even by God? Perhaps. If Jesus was to be fully human, then perhaps he needed to pass into the dark depths of despair that envelop us all at some point when we feel cut off from the source of our life and find ourselves asking “Where are you God? You said you’d be here.” That is the tension, the taught rope between faith and doubt we all walk, maybe even Jesus.
But perhaps there is even more going on here. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is actually the first line of Psalm 22. And Psalm 22 has more than one verse. As you move through it, you notice that it too vacillates between the cries of utter despair on the one end and proclamations of faith in God to come through on the other. The opening lines of agony quickly give way to lines like “Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel. Our Forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted in you and you delivered them. They cried out to you and were delivered; they trusted in you and were not put to shame.” Back and forth it goes until ultimately, Psalm 22 culminates in verses of triumph and hope. Verses that serve as our psalm portion this morning: “My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him; they shall be known as the Lord’s forever. They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.” Psalm 22 ends on a note of life, of hope for the future, of salvation by God. Did you know that’s how it ended? It’s something of a surprise to many people. But maybe not to Jesus. Jesus knew the Psalms inside and out, backwards and forwards. And while I have no doubt his tortured cry of “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” was earnest; that he was in pain. I do not think it an accident that he quoted this psalm in his hour of devastation. For Psalm 22 holds both our despair and our hope; our doubt, and our faith in God; which is the tension that drives not only the story of our scriptures, but also the story of our souls. In this one Psalm is encapsulated the entire motivating question of our faith—”God made a promise, a covenant he said was everlasting. Is it?” And the answer that rings out in this Psalm and across the scriptures and through our lives is, “YES! YES! God will keep His word.” Maybe that’s what Jesus was trying to tell us with his final words.
When he came out of the jungle, Lt. Onoda was treated to a hero’s welcome as he arrived in Japan. But he said he felt like a fool. In truth he was a little bit of both. He was not a fool for wanting to uphold his end of the agreement: his commitment to the covenant he made with his commanding officer was heroic. The foolish part was not the level of his faith, but the object of it. He put his faith in people and people often cannot bear the weight of it. But not God. God can bear the weight of our trust. For that is, after all, what he promised to do. Not to excuse us from all hardship or remove all obstacles in our lives, but, even in our moments of deepest despair, to be with us. To show up for us. To be God to us. To give us the courage, and strength, and hope, and love, and comfort, and peace that surpass all understanding. And to bring us to the other side of whatever it is we are going through, even if what we are going through is death itself. That is the promise we are preparing ourselves for in these Lenten days of prayer and penitence: the promise of Easter. If the cross poses the question—“Will God come through?”—the empty tomb is the answer. It is the emphatic restatement of God’s everlasting covenant with us. The covenant he made to Abraham and his children, forever. It reminds us, once again, that God will keep his Word, even unto death. To be God to us. Always. An everlasting covenant, unbroken and unbreakable. Amen.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/world/asia/hiroo-onoda-imperial-japanese-army-officer-dies-at-91.html