Jeremy L. Berg

You can listen to an audio version of this sermon here.

I didn’t like the song at all. It seemed hokey. It seemed non-sensical. And it didn’t help that it was being sung off key and off tempo by a small, beleaguered congregation of primarily 75 year old church ladies. Not to mention being led by someone who sort of resembled Dana Carvey’s SNL character “Church Lady.” 

You shall go out with joy 

and be led forth with peace,

And the mountains and the hills 

will break forth before you.

There’ll be shouts of joy 

and the trees of the fields

Will clap, will clap their hands.

And the trees of the fields will clap their hands,

And the trees of the fields will clap their hands,

And the trees of the fields will clap their hands,

While you go out with joy.

“Well…Isn’t that just speeeeecial!” to quote Church Lady. Here’s an epic version of the song featuring the best recorder player on YouTube!

According to the Hymnary.org website, this song composed by Jewish writer Steffi Karen Rubin in 1975 celebrates “the joy resulting from God’s salvation, a joy so far-reaching that even the “trees of the field will clap their hands,” and fruitful trees and bushes will grow instead of thorns and briers.”

Fair enough. But its been 20 years since singing this song to end each service and I still struggle to separate its message from the cheesy church lady presentation. Because if I’m honest, it wasn’t just the sing-songy piano, or 90-year old Hazel in the next pew trying to bring opera back into style that I struggled with. I was distracted—or put off—by the ridiculous Dr. Seuss like imagery conjured up by the lyrics. 

Being a visual person, I could not sing the chorus without picturing a cartoony scene (or maybe felt board, if that’s your background) of rows of trees swaying back and forth with mouths open singing and clapping their leafy branches together with great jollity. The song evoked Mary Poppins with her flying umbrella. The song evoked an episode of the Muppets or a Silly Song with Larry from Veggie Tales. The song did not lead me to worship, to Jesus, to the sweet melody of the gospel. 

Today, I repent of my former spiritual immaturity and lack of a baptized imagination sitting in that church pew. Twenty years later, I now believe in reality of singing trees with clapping hands and even the low rumble of rocks crying out as we shall soon see. In fact, as we near Holy Week I want to join the mountains and hills as they break forth in praise of God for what He has done to begin the healing of His fractured creation. 

Today I want to look afresh at the Passion Narrative and observe all the actors—not just the living  actors with speaking parts, but the inanimate and animal parts—in the unfolding drama. Surprises await those who have ears to hear and the sanctified imagination to behold. We begin with the familiar faces we encounter each year during Holy Week:

The crowd is busy waving palm branches.

Lazarus is busy shedding grave clothes. 

Mary is busy anointing.

John is busy leaning on Jesus’ breast.

Jesus is busy breaking the bread.

The Twelve are busy drinking the cup.

The chief priests are busy scheming.

Judas is busy betraying.

Peter is busy denying.

Pilate’s wife is busy dreaming.

Pilate is busy washing his hands.

Barabbas is busy being pardoned.

Jesus is busy being condemned.

The women along the road are busy weeping.

Simon of Cyrene is busy carrying Jesus’ cross.

Soldiers are busy mocking.

One thief is busy ridiculing.

Another thief is busy repenting.

Jesus is busy dying.

Mary is busy crying.

The Centurion is busy believing.

Joseph of Aramathea is busy providing a tomb.

Guards at the tomb are busy slumbering.

Angels at the tomb are busy announcing.

Mary Magdalene is busy being surprised by hope.

Thomas is busy doubting.

John and Peter are busying racing. 

Jesus is busy rising and appearing.

An impressive mix of believers and doubters, faithful and fickle, saints and sinners, and jokers and thieves to borrow from Bob Dylan. But the events of Holy Week would move and shake not just human lives. All of creation has shared in the tragic consequences of the Fall and so all creation is standing on tip-toe eager to participate in the dramatic events that will set her free from its “bondage to decay” (Rom. 8:21). 

But before the trees of the field can clap their hands in joyous celebration of God’s victory over sin and death, the dark events of Holy Week must play out. Now let’s see some of the roles non-human actors play in the drama. 

The cursed fig tree is busy teaching God’s judgment.

The donkey is busy chauffeuring the Savior.

The palm branches are busy welcoming the Messiah.

The alabaster jar is busy anointing God.

The towel and basin are busy teaching humble service.

The loaf was busy administering Christ’s presence.

The cup was busy offering a taste of amazing grace.

The swinging sword is busy teaching violence.

The rooster is busy convicting one of sin.

The fire in the courtyard is busy showing God’s warm embrace and light of grace is present even in our darkest hour of cold betrayal. 

The crown of thorns is busy the painful sting of self-sacrificial love.

The piercing nails are busy demonstrating the seriousness of sin.

The splintered cross are busy killing life. 

The darkness over the land is busy signaling Death’s last, desperate attempt to swallow up life.

The curtain in the temple is busy being torn giving direct access to God’s saving presence.

The burial shroud is busy wrapping eternity in a temporary cocoon.

The tomb is busy cradling the Creator.

Quite an array of non-human participants on stage for this most important act in the history of the cosmos! How quick we are to place ourselves in the center of the action, and how easily we overlook the key roles of donkey and palms, towel and basin, bread and cup, sword and rooster, fire and thorns, nails and wood, curtain and shroud. And let’s face it: the donkey proved more faithful than Peter, and while the disciples fell asleep on stage, the rooster nailed his one line with impeccable timing. There is no Last Supper without the bread and cup. There is no Savior without the splintered beams of a Roman cross. 

In fact, Holy Week begins each year with Jesus warning human actors that if they won’t play their part, God can get the job done with inanimate objects. In Luke 19, Jesus is entering Jerusalem, and his disciples are praising him. Some Pharisees in the crowd tell Jesus to rebuke his exuberant disciples, but Jesus responds with: “I tell you that if these people keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (19:40). 

Did you hear that? 

If we don’t recognize God’s saving activity happening under our noses; if we fail to offer God the praise and worship that is due Him; if we find ourselves tongue tied and silent, callous or blind, to His work—God can solicit the help of trees and rocks to accomplish His work.

I can imagine Jesus saying some like: “Even if my final week ends with my disciples fleeing, my best friend denying, and another friend betraying, come Sunday the mountains and the hills will break forth in praise before me. There’ll be shouts of joy and the trees of the fields will clap, will clap their hands.” And, in a sense, that’s exactly what happened. But it wasn’t so much the trees clapping, as it was the rocky earth shaking and a certain stone rolling! 

On Friday, at the moment Jesus breathed his last and gave up His spirit, Matthew says, “The earth shook, and the rocks were split” (Matt 27:51-53). As if in a solemn display of holy reverence over the death of earth-creator, the earth itself shook and the rocks split apart.  The death of Death and the penalty of Sin being borne by the only sinless One was in every sense of the word an “earth-shattering.” The rocks cried out!

And that earthquake didn’t just rumble; they preached! And they won a convert that day! Matthew states that when the Roman centurion and his entourage “saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe, and said, ‘Truly this was the Son of God!’” (Matt 27:54 ESV). 

Then on the Third Day, the singing trees stepped aside and held their breath as the rocks cried out once more in another earthquake chorus—this time rocking and rolling the rock of ages away from the tomb, preparing the way for the Author of Life to step out. According to Matthew, “There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it” (Matt 28:2). 

Death is defeated. 

Sins are forgiven. 

Jesus is alive.

Humanity is saved. 

A groaning creation is being liberated.

The rocks have cried out! 

The rolling stone has done a victory dance!  

And so…cue the church ladies! Summon the woodland choir! Let us go out with joy and be led forth with peace.

And let the mountains and the hills will break forth before the Risen One. Let there be shouts of joy and let the trees of the fields clap their hands.

*******

So what about today? What does this message offer us? Many are quick to say that shouting rocks and singing trees are just a metaphor. That Jesus’ warning simply means that even if humans fail to praise God, creation itself will testify to his glory and power. True enough. But there’s a deeper reminder of our original human vocation to ponder here. 

On the sixth day of creation, God created human beings “in His image” to serve as his co-rulers. Psalm 8 declares: 

You have made him [mankind] a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,

All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,

The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas. (Psalm 8)

And let us add to the list singing trees and crying rocks.

We were placed in a garden with a divine commission to be wise and fruitful caretakers. To grow things. Prune things. Guard things. Expand life. Multiply goodness. Build houses. Grow families. Advance civilization. To cultivate cultures of flourishing—for both human beings and the natural world. When we faithfully fulfill our image-bearing vocation, all creation sings and dances and hums along to the divine melody of shalom permeating the cosmos. Rocks rest quietly while trees sway gently. 

Tragically, we fell asleep at the wheel early in the story. We let weeds overrun God’s good creation. Now the only sound God’s creation can muster most days is muted moans of madness in a minor key. From manmade climate change to polluted oceans. From melting polar ice caps to raping the rainforest. These are not the invented narratives of a tree-hugging liberal agenda. These are the rocks crying out in agony and the trees singing a funeral dirge. These are the collective groans of a creation Jesus came to set free slipping back into bondage again because God’s people are once again falling asleep on the job. 

The great literary sagas grasp this foundational truth that the fate of humanity is inextricably bound up with the fate of the natural world. In the Lord of the Rings, we cheer and sing for joy when the trees giants, ents, are awakened to join in the great battle for Middle Earth. Who can forget the scene in the film where the small, vulnerable hobbits are carried along in the branches of the embattled trees on the move. In a 1955 letter to his publisher, Tolkien wrote “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human mistreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.”

There’s a poetic beauty in the fact that Christ’s ultimate act of self-giving love and earth-shaking forgiveness was accomplished while nailed to the wood of a tree. That tree was also pierced by the nails that pierced the Lord. When Jesus cried out from the cross on behalf of all of sin-burdened humanity, “My God, my God, why hath thou forsaken me?”, we might imagine the tree crying out as well on behalf of all the rest of the groaning non-human creation. (I pursue this a bit in my short story The Knotty Tale of the Cursed Fig Tree.) 

Jesus was not merely forgiving individual sins on that cross long ago. He was absorbing in His very being all of the cumulative pain and suffering and corruption and exploitation found in both human kingdoms and the animal kingdom. His agonizing groans carried the groans of every parent who has buried a child, every village swept away by a mudslide or tsunami, every wounded animal dying alone in agony, every species that has gone extinct, every healthy life stolen by disease or famine. They all found a voice in Jesus’ cry from the cross. And they all found hope in the rumble of the earthquake that helped roll the stone away that first Easter. 

What is the message for us today? Perhaps its the call to heed Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees that first Holy Week who wanted to silence the worship of Jesus’ followers. If we don’t offer proper worship to God—and worship is not going to church and singing songs, but rather encompasses our foundational royal priest vocation of being faithful co-rulers and wise stewards over God’s good creation—we will continue hearing the rocks crying out for liberation. Not only the rocks, but  also the oceans, ice caps and rain forests, land animals and sea creatures also moaning and groaning under the lingering effects of the curse. 

On the other hand, when God’s people rise up and get busy cultivating the garden of New Creation, we will join the Psalmist in summoning the praises of all creation before Almighty God:

Praise the Lord from the earth,
You great sea creatures and all the depths;

Fire and hail, snow and clouds;
Stormy wind, fulfilling His word;

Mountains and all hills;
Fruitful trees and all cedars;

Beasts and all cattle;
Creeping things and flying fowl; Kings of the earth and all peoples;
Princes and all judges of the earth;

Both young men and maidens;
Old men and children.

Let them praise the name of the Lord,
For His name alone is exalted;
His glory is above the earth and heaven. (Psalm 148)

And, yes, this includes old church ladies in small town congregations singing, “And the trees of the field will clap, will clap, their hands.”