Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 3, 19 April 2026

Luke 24:13-35

‘But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.’

It is the first day of the week, and two of Jesus’ disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, sick at heart. These two are not members of the Twelve, now Eleven. We have never heard of Cleopas before; we do not hear of him again, and we do not know the name of the other disciple. They are ordinary followers of Jesus, devastated by his death. They had hoped that Jesus would be the one to liberate Israel, as had been promised by Moses and the prophets. But Jesus had been crucified and all their hopes had been dashed.

What do these two disciples mean by ‘redeeming Israel’? We know that ‘Moses and the prophets’ can be read in different ways. One story that they tell is that the Lord’s special love for Israel over the nations not only justifies Israelite violence, but it also promises military success. In Deuteronomy Moses tells the Israelites: ‘But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. Indeed, you shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded.’ (Deuteronomy 20:16-17) On their journey to the Promised Land the king of Arad attacks the Israelites and we are told: ‘Then Israel made a vow to the Lord and said, “If you will indeed give this people into our hands, then we will utterly destroy their towns.” The Lord listened to the voice of Israel and handed over the Canaanites, and they utterly destroyed them and their towns; so the place was called Hormah, destruction.’ (Numbers 21:1-3) The Torah is filled with such stories, and the prophets warn the nations that the Lord will treat them as they treat Israel. Had these two disciples expected that Jesus, as Messiah, would lead them against the Romans, that God would give the Romans into his hands?

If the only story the Hebrew Scriptures told was of a tribal god who fought for a single nation, the Israelite religion would have died in the same way that other similar ancient religions did. No one today worships the gods of Canaan or Assyria or Babylon. But throughout the Hebrew Scriptures there is a second theme. The God who liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt is the God of all the nations, who liberates the whole world. The Prophets Isaiah, whose Book is often called ‘the fifth gospel,’ is full of the hope of this universal salvation. ‘In days to come,’ promises Isaiah, ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.’ (Isaiah 2:2) Isaiah speaks of a time when Israel will not dominate other nations, but be blessed alongside other nations: ‘On that day Israel will be the third party with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel my heritage.”’ (Isaiah 19:24-25) Those of us for whom these prophecies are Scripture look forward to the day when:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.’ (Isaiah 25:6-8)

And of course the Messiah through whom this will happen, the Servant who suffers, is the one of whom God says: ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’ (Isaiah 49:6).

This universalism is a minority view within the Hebrew Scriptures, although it is at the heart of some of our favourite stories: those of Ruth and Jonah and Job. But without it Judaism would have died after the war of 70 AD, when the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords and were utterly defeated, leading to the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of Temple worship. Judaism, like Christianity, survived this defeat because of those parts of the Hebrew Scriptures that describe the Lord as a universal God, rather than the god of a single nation only able to be worshipped in a single land.

We cannot know what form these disciples’ hope that Jesus was ‘the one to redeem Israel’ took, whether they had been looking forward to military victory over the Romans. We do know that Jesus’ interpretation to them of the things that had been written about himself in all the scriptures would show them that he was the one to redeem Israel, but in another way entirely. Jesus was not merely ‘a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,’ although he was that. He is the Messiah who suffers and enters his glory. The crucifixion was not a tragic mistake, but a sign of God’s love. God’s power is not shown in violence against the nations; in the crucifixion God does not redeem Israel alone but the whole creation.

That should all be absolutely obvious, but sadly it seems it is not. There are Christians today who still seem to be wedded to an ancient tribal religion; who believe that God has a special care for their nation and Israel, as opposed to all the nations of the world; that God cares for them and people like them more than God cares about the rest of humanity. And so, of course, I come to Donald J. Trump, the current President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world. I am not going to mention Trump’s blasphemous portrayal of himself as Jesus, except to laugh at it, because that was a step too far even for his Christian followers. I am going to mention his feud with the current Pope, the first American to be elected to that office, and his argument that God is on the side of the USA and Israel in their attacks on Iran and Lebanon. Mr Trump finished a recent address to the nation by saying: ‘And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.’ The Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has also consistently argued that the war in Iran is sanctioned by God, repeatedly referring to ‘God’s almighty providence’ and proclaiming that God is on the side of the US military.

I am in absolutely no way a supporter of the regime that currently rules Iran, but I am completely on the side of Pope Leo, and I am going to quote from the homily he gave at a recent prayer vigil for peace:

Prayer teaches us how to act. In prayer, our limited human possibilities are joined to the infinite possibilities of God. Thoughts, words and deeds then break the demonic cycle of evil and are placed at the service of the Kingdom of God. A Kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit, but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness. It is here that we find a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive. The balance within the human family has been severely destabilized. Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death. A world of brothers and sisters with one heavenly Father vanishes, as in a nightmare, giving way to a reality populated by enemies. We are met by threats, rather than the invitation to listen and to come together. Brothers and sisters, those who pray are aware of their own limitations; they do not kill or threaten with death. Instead, death enslaves those who have turned their backs on the living God, turning themselves and their own power into a mute, blind and deaf idol (cf. Ps 115:4–8), to which they sacrifice every value, demanding that the whole world bend its knee.

(My Scottish Presbyterian grandfather is undoubtedly spinning in his grave at me quoting the Pope.)

I have spoken before about the author of the Gospel according to Matthew quoting the prophets and that second, universalist, theme within the Hebrew Scriptures to justify the concept of an inclusive Israel, to argue that God always intended the nations to receive justice and liberation, and that Jesus is the one in whose name the Gentiles will hope. I find it absolutely bizarre that any Christian who reads the gospels can argue that the Father of Jesus Christ cares more for the people of one nation than another, that we are not, in the words of Pope Leo, living in ‘a world of brothers and sisters with one heavenly Father’.

As you know, I have been reading some of the books I inherited from Dorothy and Ian Hansen, and I want to end by quoting from two of them. The first comes from that collection of sermons from which I quoted on Palm Sunday, from a sermon given by the Reverend Colin Morris, then the Minister of Wesley’s Chapel. Previously he had spent fifteen years serving the Methodist Church in what was then Northern Rhodesia and he says:

In a number of ways, my stay in Africa has made it impossible for me to think in terms of any allegiance less embracing than all mankind. I can see no virtue in blind patriotism and no realism in ecclesiastical affiliations. I have come to believe that anything, however worthwhile it may seem in itself, which cuts me off from my fellow-human beings, is evil.[1]

And my final quote comes from a collection of prayers put together by the Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz. He says of this ‘Hebrew Prayer for Our Enemies’ that he found it among some old family papers written in a hand unknown to him with the title ‘Armistice Day,’ and that he thought the author might have been a friend of his parents.[2] The prayer is:

O Lord our God and God of our Fathers, we pray that, in this moment of victory, we may remember the legend handed down to us by our Doctors: that when, after the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam raised her voice in exaltation, and the angels at the Throne of Thy Glory began to take up the refrain, Thou didst rebuke them, saying, “What! My children are drowning and you would sing?”

Amen.

[1] Colin Morris, ‘Prisoners of Hope,’ in Hugh Montefiore (ed), More Sermons from Great St Mary’s (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), p. 149.

[2] Barbara Greene and Victor Gollancz, God of a Hundred Names: Prayers of Many Peoples and Creeds (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1962), p. 78-9.