( Numbers 21,4-9 ) - [ Deutsch ]
Dear congregation
The kingdom of God is among you, in your midst (cf. Lk 17:21), says Jesus. This means that God's actions determine our presence. As a result, we live in harmony with God, with ourselves and with our neighbour. There is no oppression. Everyone comes to their right. No one is taken advantage of. Everyone has enough. The kingdom of God comes true when there is fellowship with everyone, especially with the weak, the poor and the marginalized.
The kingdom of God is among you, in your midst.
I would like to believe that this is a reality.
But, no matter how much I tell myself and wish for it, even the self-fulfilling prophecy fails here, and every platitudinous saying, such as 'you can achieve anything if you want it bad enough', is shattered by real events. I'm not naive. I read the newspaper, listen to the news, talk to people. I read that millions of people in eastern Congo have lost their homes and jobs, and they say: 'We feel powerless to change our circumstances'. I hear that South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. And through personal conversations, I know of people who have been betrayed, abandoned and humiliated by the very person they loved the most.
Where is the kingdom of God among us and in us? Where is it?
This question makes me doubt, doubt God, his promises and assurances. Isn't the risk of believing too high? Are we being fooled? After all, everything is hopelessly lost.
People from the nation of Israel wrestled and struggled with the same and similar questions. What they had already been through: deportations, times in exile and the return to the so-called homeland, where things were different from what they had hoped for. Not everyone had experienced it in the same way. How the past and the present were interpreted was the subject of much controversy.
How did they experience God? Like a hen who took her chicks under her wing (cf. Ps 91:4). Like a shepherd who let them graze in green pastures (cf. Ps 23). But also like a violent attacker who injured them, as we know from the battle at Jabok (cf. Gen 32). How did they bring these encouraging, comforting, but also challenging and overwhelming experiences together with their God? With this God in whom they believed, in whom they hoped, but with whom they always struggled and wrestled. How did they reconcile the ambivalence of their existence and their lives with their understanding of themselves and God? We heard a story that tells of these conflicts in the reading. The people of Israel are in the desert. They have been wandering around in this hostile wasteland for 40 years. Although they experience God's closeness, God's care and God's salvation time and again, they had actually imagined things differently. They remember what their parents and grandparents told them: God led them out of slavery in Egypt, miraculously rescued them through the Sea of Reeds. 'I am your God and you are my people' (cf. Ex 6:7/Lev 26:12). 'I will bring you up to a beautiful and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey' (cf. Ex 3:7). These beautiful big words. It has been almost forty years now, and this hope, this faith, is what they have subordinated their entire lives to. They have followed this longing. But what good are these words if everything they seeis sand, if everything they feel under their feet is sand, if the sand crunches between their teeth with every bite they eat? They really thought that God's promise would be fulfilled. They believed so much, hoped so much. But now enough is enough. 'Why did you bring us up from Egypt? So that we might die in this desert? Because there is no bread and no water' (Num 21:5). Let us admit to ourselves that we have made fools of ourselves. Let us return to Egypt while we still can and while our children had not yet perished in this hostile environment. That's what they thought.
The reason for this reaction is often described as 'the people became impatient or disgruntled' (Num 21:4). In my opinion, this translation is misleading. The Hebrew says something that can probably only be paraphrased, namely: their bubbling life energy, their passion, became too little. Martin Buber translated it as 'faint-hearted'. They were overcome by pusillanimity. Not a very common word, but it probably describes what happened quite accurately. To become faint-hearted means to become afraid of one's own courage, to give up hope completely; to no longer believe in what one can achieve. This is not about megalomania, no, it is about the power and strength that is granted and given to you.
They were prepared to go back to Egypt and, like their grandparents back then, to work and live as slaves. Anyone who voluntarily wants to go back to bondage, who wants to go back to their tormentors, has really lost all hope. The people had lost all prospects for the future. In doing so, they made themselves small to nothing. And in doing so, they made their God small, who had promised them this power and believed in them.
And we know the saying: hope dies last. But when hope dies, everything is lost. Then there is only the end, death. And the people had to experience that too. Death came for many.
'Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people; they bit the people, and many of Israel died. (Num 21:6).
People who have no more hope face death - and now, in the face of death, they do something that I find fascinating, but also disturbing. They connect their hopeless situation directly with God. When they see death, they can't help but associate this death directly with God. And the death they saw, the hopelessness that spread, caused something in them that I can't describe. There is nothing about it in the tradition either. But in this fear of death, in the awareness of the final end, they did not want to die; they did not want to return to bondage, they did not want to be slaves. They want to be able to believe and hope. And they turn back.
And God, with whom people have brought death, their end together, is also the one who saves them, has mercy, gives new life, new faith and new hope. And this happens in a very remarkable way.
God allows them to see what made them afraid, to see what killed them and robbed them of the courage to hope and faith. But God doesn't just make them look at it, he makes them look up. This expresses the fact that they had to lift themselves up, look away from themselves. In order to overcome this terrible situation, they had to look up, to focus on something else. Help came to them from outside.
In the second reading from Matthew's Gospel (Mt 26:36-46), we encounter a similar situation. We meet Jesus, who is tormented by great fear in the knowledge of what is about to happen to him. He seems to lose hope that he will have the strength to endure what is about to happen to him. He becomes faint-hearted. He is afraid of his own courage. In his fear of death, he does not turn away from God - thank God - but towards God and complains to him about his fear. Jesus is strengthened by God in this hopelessness,which also manifests itself in his death, so that he can face what is happening to him. Then, even if hope had died for the disciples with Jesus' death, death and hopelessness did not have the last word.
Dear congregation, yes, we are afraid. We often feel that we are overcome by hopelessness and we struggle to believe that God's kingdom is in our midst - in your midst and in my midst.
What can we do to counter this? How do we come to believe and hope that God's kingdom is already here in our world, that God's yes is above our world? What makes us believe and hope despite everything?
I believe the answer lies in a you, in a counterpart. In the fact that man is first and foremost a being that lives from and in relationships and only comes to life through them.
The hopelessness of the Israelites began to fade when they broke free from their encapsulation and came into contact with their surroundings again. They asked Moses for help, they listened to God when He told them what to do and they became hopeful again when they looked up and stood upright.
Jesus did not seek out a lonely place in his despair, no; he sought fellowship with his disciples. He asked them not to leave him alone. And in addition to human closeness, he sought God and told him of his despair. And the really comforting and hopeful thing about this story is that the human inability, the lack of human fellowship - the disciples kept falling asleep - was not the end. God himself comforted Jesus and gave him faith and hope, which dispelled his pusillanimity.
I am convinced that we find faith and hope in fellowship with people and God.
I learn to hope when I see that there is still a future together despite injuries in a relationship.
I learn to believe when I see how people with a cancer diagnosis and poor prospects spread confidence, when the here and now becomes more important and life on earth is not everything after all.
I learn to believe and hope when I am assured that God's Kingdom, i.e. God's Presence, is already within me and when I see that God's Presence is in you.
Amen