Sermons
SERMONS
1. Was Jesus Having a Bad Day?
2. Two Healings
3. On the Holy Trinity
4. On the Suffering Servant
5. On Recent Disasters
6. On the Temptation of Christ
7. On the Logos Hymn
8. On Ephesians 1
9. On the Magnificat
10. On the Benedictus
11. On the Nunc Dimittis
12. On the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats
13. On Psalm 2
14. On the Son of Man
15. On David and Goliath
Matthew 15:21-29
In this morning’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples have crossed the Northern border of Galilee out of Jewish territory into the seaport region of Tyre and Sidon. That’s about 60 miles West of the city of Homs in Syria, current in the news. It looks as if they went there for some quiet so that Jesus could teach his disciples beyond the reach of the crowds.
But there was a mother with a very sick child. In the limited medical knowledge of the day she describes her daughter as “grievously vexed with a devil”. This woman knows who Jesus is – she addresses him by the Messianic title “Son of David” – and asks him as an act of mercy to cure the girl.
As the story develops, you see three things that you may find rather unsettling. First, Jesus ignores the woman: “He answered her not a word.” Second, the disciples ask him to “send her away, for she crieth after us”: ‘She’s being a nuisance tell her to get lost.’ Third, when the woman persists, Jesus says that his ministry is to the Jews, and that ‘it would not be right to take the children’s bread and throw it to dogs.’
Now, this rudeness (as it seems) is so uncharacteristic of Jesus that you have to ask, What’s going on here? Is this what Jesus is like when he’s having a bad day? Or should we be looking for some other explanation?
The story occurs in both Matthew and Mark, and the first thing you notice is that the woman is not Jewish. When Mark tells this story in Chapter 7 of his gospel, he calls her a “Greek”, which identifies her language and classes her among the Gentiles. He also calls her a Syro-Phoenician, which means her citizenship was Syrian, and she was born in the region of Tyre and Sidon, anciently known as Phoenicia. In today’s reading, Matthew calls her a Canaanite. He’s not disagreeing with Mark; he’s making the point that her Phoenician ancestors were among the bad guys that the Hebrews had to conquer when they settled in Canaan. Now, the Canaanites were in fact a Semitic people, but as far as the Jews were concerned, ‘She’s not one of us.’ So you can understand the disciples’ reaction: ‘Tell her to go away.’
I think what’s happening here is that Jesus immediately recognizes that, in God’s providence, he has before him a “teachable moment” that he can make good use of. So he “sets up” everybody in the story. He sets up the woman to have her request fulfilled, and he sets up the disciples to learn an important lesson. The clue to what’s going on here is in Jesus’ line about throwing the children’s food to the dogs. Unfortunately, that clue is not obvious in most English translations.
Throughout the New Testament, when you read about dogs – as in “the dogs licked [Lazarus’] wounds” (Luke 16:21) or Paul’s uncomplimentary warning “Beware of the dogs” (Philippians 3:2) – you find the normal Greek word for dogs, which is kunes (it’s related to our word canine). But in this story, and only in this story, Jesus uses the diminutive form kunaria: which is not “dogs”, but “doggies”, or “puppy dogs”; that is, “household pets”. It’s a term of affection, and I think Jesus intends it to be deliberately disarming.
So the disciples say, “Send her away.” And Jesus, who needs to keep the disciples onside until they understand the lesson he’s going to teach them, appears to go along with this when he says to her, “I am sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But hear him say it gently. He wants the woman to ask a second time.
And ask she does – on her knees. Which gives him an opening to escalate the rhetoric: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to….” And the disciples expect to hear the disparaging word “dogs”. Imagine their astonishment when they hear instead the affectionate term “puppy dogs”.
Now, this woman can read tone and body language. She figures out what Jesus is doing and she knows how to play it through. ‘True,’ she says – no longer pleading, I think, but with just enough histrionics to show she knows what’s going on, and knows that Jesus wants to do the healing – ‘but even the puppy dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ “’Great is your faith,’ Jesus answers her. ‘Be it done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was made whole that very hour.”
This woman has already addressed Jesus as “Son of David”. She believes he is the Messiah. She believes it sufficiently to ask him for a miracle. She also understands that Jesus’ ministry has to focus on his own people. But she dares to believe that God and his Messiah may have some crumbs of mercy for non-Jews as well. And as it turns out, the “crumbs” that she receives are just as complete a healing as any that Jesus performed among his own people. That was a lesson that both the disciples and, a few years later, the early Jewish church needed to get hold of, because without it the gospel would never have been spread into the Gentile world. Which is why Jesus set up the conversation with her as he did, and why Mark and Matthew recorded the incident.
Now, two thousand years later, we have come to think of equal rights and universal access – to whatever – as in so many ways our entitlement that we may miss the significance for ourselves in this woman’s experience. She’s an outsider. She’s not a member of God’s covenant people. She does not keep the Law, does not attend synagogue, and has no access to the spiritual benefits of the yearly cycle of the Jewish sacrifices. At least in a formal sense, she is outside the grace of God.
But 1800 years earlier, God had made a promise to Abraham: that Abraham would “surely become a great and mighty nation and in him all the nations of the earth shall be blessed”(Genesis 18:18). Problem was, as Abraham pointed out to God, he and Sarah were advanced in years and had no offspring. So God promised Abraham and Sarah a son in their old age. And we read that “Abraham believed God, and God counted it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). A few years later, at the sacrifice Isaac – which doesn’t happen because God provides a substitute – God repeats that promise, but with a twist: “In your seed – or, offspring – all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 22:18&#;.
Paul picks up this theme in his letter to the Galatians, where he notes that “the Scripture – i.e., the Old Testament – foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles through faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Galatians 3:8,9).
Paul points out that “the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.” He emphasizes that “it does not say, ‘and to seeds (offsprings),’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘and to your seed (offspring),’ who,” says Paul, “is Christ” (Galatians 3:16).
Now it’s easy enough to see that Jesus is descended from Abraham, but how can Paul say that the gospel was “preached beforehand” to Abraham? “Preached beforehand” must mean something like “foreshadowed”. Abraham’s son Isaac foreshadows Jesus in two important details: Isaac’s birth was a seeming impossibility that would not have happened without the hand of God, and Isaac’s descendants would never have existed if God had not provided a substitutionary sacrifice on Mount Moriah. Those are the same two occasions on which God made Abaham the promise that in him, i.e., in his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. So this daughter of an ancient enemy, finds herself in the presence of that very descendant of Abraham of whom the Scripture says, “In him shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” She comes to him in faith, and receives the healing she desires. That healing is more than just a cure for her daughter’s illness. It’s a sign that the Kingdom of God is among them, and it’s a foretaste of the future restoration of a very bent world. In that restoration, which we enter even now by faith in Jesus the Messiah, even believing Gentiles enjoy status among God’s covenant people. “So then,” says Paul, “those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith…. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:16,29).
So as we come to the Lord’s Table this morning, let us “remember that [we] were at [one] time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope, and without God in this world. But now in Christ Jesus [we] who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. So then [we] are no longer strangers and aliens, but .. fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” ( Ephesians 2:12,13,19).
Micah 3:5-12
John 4:43-5:9
When the prophet Micah describes the situation in Judah and Israel around 700 BC – unjust government and self-serving clergy – you know he’s going to predict a disaster: Jerusalem will become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the LORD’s house – the Temple Mount – will be overgrown like a forest on a hill. The prediction came to pass and in a string of Assyrian and Babylonian attacks and the Jews spent most of two hundred years in exile.
Now, there are recurring patterns in the affairs of God and man, so seven hundred years after Micah’s prophecy, the situation in Judea was just a variation on the theme – corrupt government and self-serving clergy. Jesus had an eye for those patterns, so one day when the disciples were oohing and awing over the stonemasonry of Jerusalem’s Second Temple, Jesus astonished them by saying, “The days will come, in which there will not be left one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:1ff). The prediction was again fulfilled when the Romans sacked the city forty years later in AD 70 and, as in Micah’s time, they destroyed the Temple. This kind of recurring pattern underlies much of what we read in the gospels, including the two healings in today’s gospel.
When John reports Jesus’ healings, he calls them “signs”. The Greek word is semeia, from which we get the English word “semiotics”, the study of how we communicate with signs and symbols. John would have us understand Jesus’ epiphany – his manifestation to his countrymen – as an exercise in semiotics. The healing of the official’s son, John says, was the second sign that Jesus did when he came from Judea to Galilee ; the first sign, in the previous chapter, was turning water into wine.
Now, the important thing about signs is that we need to read their meaning correctly. In the case of the gospel signs, John tells us plainly from the beginning what they mean. In Chapter 1 he writes: “The Word became flesh and dwelt – or tabernacled – among us, and we beheld his glory” – a glory, John says, that marks him as the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth (1:14). The verb John uses to say “dwelt among us” actually means “to dwell in a tent”. So the eternal Word “pitched his tent” – or “tabernacled” – among us.
Now, “to pitch your tent somewhere” could be nothing more than a folksy way of saying “to live somewhere”, like our English expression “Where do you hang your hat?” But combine that tent metaphor with “we beheld his glory”, then add John’s observation that Jesus’ glory resembled the Father’s glory – and what you have is a picture comparing Jesus to the Tabernacle in the wilderness, that great tent of worship where in Moses’ day God travelled with his people and manifested his presence as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. In John’s mind, the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and subsequently the Temple in Jerusalem, were but foreshadowings of Jesus, whom John portrays as that sacred tent in which God dwells among his people and manifests his glory, full of grace and truth.
So when John tells us about these two healings, we already know what they’re supposed to show. But the two healings are as different as chalk and cheese. One takes place in Galilee, the other a hundred kilometers away in Jerusalem. One involves a young child, the other a man who had been lame for 38 years. The first healing is performed at a distance, the second is up close and personal. In the first, the boy’s father approaches Jesus with an urgent request, and Jesus appears to brush him off. In the second, it is Jesus who takes the initiative to approach the invalid. It’s because these accounts are so different from each other that John has paired them together.
John relates the first account as an illustration of genuine faith. The father of the sick lad hears that Jesus is in Cana, so he travels from his home in Capernaum to ask for a miracle. That was like going from Hamilton to Brantford. Along the Rail Trail. Before it was paved. The man’s efforts are obviously sincere, so Jesus’ reply is puzzling when he says, “You folk won’t believe unless you see signs and wonders.” He is speaking to the man, but he isn’t really speaking about him. The “you” in Jesus’ statement is plural. He’s referring to some collection of people who want to see him perform miracles, but with the wrong motives.
Now, John identifies this man as a basilikos – one of the “king’s men”. Some translations call him a nobleman others call him a government official. One way or another he is connected to Herod Antipas. That’s the bad guy who executed John the Baptist. The same Herod who questioned Jesus at his trial, where Luke tells us that he “had long desired to see [Jesus] because … he was hoping to see some sign done by him” (Luke 23:8). The king wanted to see a parlor trick.
Now, it’s already past noon when the man arrives from Capernaum. Jesus has to know that he’s been on the road since dawn, or maybe even the day before. I think Jesus was setting him up to show others what Jesus already knew: that this man, unlike the rest of Herod’s lot, has real faith and right motives. He shows that faith when he protests, “Sir, come before my child dies.” He shows it again when he accepts Jesus’ assurance that the child will live even though Jesus does not go back home with him.
And he shows it again the next day when his servants ride out to meet him with the good news, and he realizes that “the seventh hour” when his son started to get better – that’s about one o’clock in the afternoon – was the same time when Jesus said he would get better. This man understood the principle that when you ask the Lord for something, the answer may look like a coincidence, but when you stop asking, the coincidences stop happening.
John tells us that “[the father] himself believed, and all his household” (4:53). Now the fact that “he believed and all his household” is not something that the folk back in Cana could have known from 25 miles away. They could only know this if they had subsequent contact with him. In fact, “he believed and all his household” is the sort of language you find in the Acts of the Apostles when a family was baptized and became part of the church.
When we turn to the second healing account, we see Jesus outside a gate in the city wall. There were two large reservoirs, an upper and a lower, separated by a dam that supported a roadway. The area was identified by archaeologists in the 1800s. It was an elegant structure, designed for public bathing, with five stone porches, supporting columns, and a roof overhead. Nearby there were caves with therapeutic baths. There must have been an underground hot spring feeding the baths, because some manuscripts of John’s gospel insert a note to this passage explaining that people tried to be first into the pool for healing when, as they thought, an angel troubled the waters.
So Jesus sees this man who has been an invalid for 38 years. He’s sitting on his bedroll, his back leaning against a pillar, watching life go on around him, passing him by. A stranger comes up to him and says, “Do you want to be healed?” The man starts to explain that he has no one to put him into the water, and can’t get in fast enough on his own. The stranger tells him, “Stand up, pick up your bedroll, and walk.” The man must have believed Jesus, because John says he did that very thing, and then John adds – with semiotic intent – “And that day was the Sabbath.”
If the first healing shows that our salvation depends on having faith in Jesus, the second shows the parallel truth, that our salvation depends on God’s sovereign grace. It says that we’re spiritual invalids, and that unless Jesus takes the initiative, we have no one else to help us. This story wants us to understand that Jesus is the agent of God’s sovereign grace.
If you read on in the chapter you find that the Jewish clergy, instead of rejoicing with the invalid in his new-found health, chastised the poor fellow for carrying his bedroll on the Sabbath. They were even more angry with Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. But what they neglected is that the Sabbath is not only for rest, but for renewal, for re-creation. The Sabbath is a symbol of the future that God intends for his people. Hebrews 4:9 says that there is a Sabbath rest still awaiting the people of God. So what they saw that day was a sign – a sign that they misread – a sign anticipating the restoration of God’s creation after that final destruction at the end of all things.
John pairs these two very different accounts to show that God’s grace is available to all – young and old, high-born and low – and that we all are equally – and helplessly – in need of it. In each case, Jesus heals with only a word. No healing waters, no laying on of hands, just God’s powerful commanding word – God’s word made flesh, and dwelling among them – among us – as he dwelt among his people long ago in the Tabernacle in the wilderness.
John pulls together for us the significance of the tabernacle imagery and the healings in a vision that he describes in the book of Revelation: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….” “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 211f, 22, 3f).
Isaiah 6:1-8
Mark 1:1-13
Today is Trinity Sunday. Today we should ponder what we mean when we say that God is a Trinity. But to speak about God in his three-ness is treading on holy ground, where, like Moses before the burning bush, we ought to be removing whatever is the intellectual equivalent of our sandals, if we knew how. When Isaiah had that vision of God in the Temple (Isaiah 6:1ff), the two seraphim knew how: they covered their feet with their wings they covered their faces, too. For there are places so sacred we cannot go, and things so sacred we cannot see. That is the meaning of the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Temple, where statues of seraphim stood guard over the ark of the covenant, and only the high priest could go there, and only once each year, and only bearing the blood of the Yom Kippur sacrifice.
So you can understand Isaiah’s discomfort when he had this vision. “Woe is me! I am undone. Mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5). But the glorious fact is that God has chosen to make himself known to us. God wants us to know him. But we can know him only when we approach his self-revelation with the reverence of a penitent. We can know him only when he says, “this hath touched thy lips, thine iniquity is taken away, thy sin is purged” (Isaiah 6:7). That sort of reverence must be the spirit in which we ponder the meaning of Trinity Sunday.
Trinity Sunday is unlike Christmas and Easter and Pentecost and Ascension Day, in that Trinity Sunday does not commemorate a particular historical event. In fact there was no Trinity Sunday until the year 1162. That’s the year when Thomas å Becket was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Thomas’ first act as Archbishop (with the Pope’s approval) was to declare a new festival on that day in honor of the Holy Trinity. From that beginning at Canterbury, the observance of Trinity Sunday spread throughout the Western Church.
Becket’s choice of the first Sunday after Pentecost as a feast day to honor God as Trinity makes an important statement about our understanding of God. It says that God’s self-revelation – God’s revelation of himself – is now complete. Or, at least, as complete as we shall have in this life. Throughout the Old Testament we see God as the Father – as the God of Creation and Providence. In the Gospels we see God as the Savior who died and rose and promised to come again. And then in the Acts of the Apostles, we see God at Pentecost as the Holy Spirit who indwells believers to change their lives and empower them for his service. And when you take those three realities together, you find yourself compelled, as the writers of the New Testament were, to think of the One God as a Trinity.
But if we let our understanding of God’s three-ness stop there, we risk falling into the error of thinking of God like a one-man stage-play where a single actor puts on different costumes according to the role he is playing at any particular time. (Like Wingfield Farm or Billy Bishop Goes to War.) But a three-ness, achieved, as it were, by a change of costume, is not the Trinity that’s revealed in Scripture. The God we meet in the Bible is both really one and really three, and both at the same time.
For example, the baptism of Jesus was a Trinitarian event. All of God was there, and all of God was at work: The Son was there embracing the task of redemption; the Father was there proclaiming once again the Son’s commission in the words of Psalm 2; the Holy Spirit was there empowering and directing him. And whereas the voice of the Father from heaven is clearly divine, and the dove signifying the Holy Spirit is clearly divine, John the Baptist declares that Jesus is also divine, when he says that he (John) had been baptizing his followers with water, but Jesus would soon baptize them with nothing less than God’s Holy Spirit.
Now that’s easy enough to see in the New Testament. But the three persons of God are also there in the Old Testament. There are over 200 references in the Old Testament to “the Holy Spirit” or “the Spirit of God” or “the Spirit of the LORD”. The same Spirit of God who was present at Jesus’ baptism, the same Spirit who baptized the disciples with tongues of fire at Pentecost, was also present at the creation of the universe: “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God brooded upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Brooded, like a hen warming her eggs until they hatch – “..the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast |&| with ah! bright wings” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”).
The Old Testament also sees the Holy Spirit as the inspirer of gifts, both natural gifts and supernatural gifts. The workmen who built Solomon’s Temple are described as being “filled .. with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship” (Exodus 35:31). King David, as one of the writers of Scripture, claims nothing less than prophetic inspiration: “The Spirit of the LORD speaks by me; his word is on my tongue (2 Samuel 23:2).
We also see in the Old Testament what may be pre-incarnation appearances of Jesus. In the book of the prophet Daniel, the king of Babylon cast three Jewish lads into a fired-up smelting furnace because they refused to bow down to his golden image – probably the same smelter in which the image was made. But when King Nebuchadnezzar looked into the smelter, he “was astonished …. ‘Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?’ …. ‘But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods’” (Daniel 3:24f).
There are also in the Old Testament nearly 70 references to a manifestation of God that appears under the title “the Angel of the LORD”. In the book of Judges, this Angel of the LORD foretells the birth of Samson. Samson’s father says to him, “What is your name, so that, when your words come true, we may honor you?” And the angel of the LORD replies, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” (Judges 13:17f).
“…my name…is Wonderful.” How can that not send your mind racing to Isaiah 9:6: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, …and his Name shall be called – Wonderful!” “Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace!” Now, we’re told that the titles in that list were titles typically given to an Egyptian king. But in the prophet’s mouth they take on a whole new level of meaning. His Name – that sacred Name that a Jew does not pronounce – encompasses the Wonderful Counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace – whom together we know as the Mighty God.
Now, it has been objected that the Bible does not give us a definition of the Trinity, that the Bible does not even contain the word “Trinity”. Well, of course it doesn’t! The Bible, as you’ve heard it said many times, is not a textbook of systematic theology but a record of God’s revelation of himself. If you’re Moses standing before the Burning Bush, if you’re Isaiah seeing that vision of God in the Temple, if you’ve just witnessed the empty tomb, or been struck by a light on the road to Damascus, you don’t ask for theological definitions you take off your sandals and fall to your knees. And when you finally get up again, you proclaim the life-changing experience. It is for us who come after to give these things labels and definitions.
And as one who comes after, I propose that the doctrine of the Trinity is a necessary doctrine. God must be a Trinity, because God must be self-sufficient. Remember those high school classes in English grammar, and French grammar, and Latin grammar? Remember how we learned to identify pronouns as first person – I, we, the speaker; and second person – you, the person spoken to; and third person – he, she, it, they, the person or thing spoken about? Every grammar of every language in the world needs to be able to distinguish between the person speaking, the person spoken to, and the person or thing spoken about – because you need those three possibilities to be able to express the full range of possible relationships.
Now, because God is both personal and self-sufficient, he must experience within himself the full range of possible relationships. God must have meaningful communication, from himself, to himself, about himself. Of course, if someone catches me talking to myself, about myself, the little man in the white coat is likely to come along and take me away. That’s because by myself I’m not self-sufficient. Which is another way of saying, I’m not a trinity. But when God (if we can say it in human terms) talks to himself about himself, he is both his own best audience and his own most interesting subject matter.
Now you may think that this line of reasoning just takes something that we find here on earth and projects it on high. But it’s actually quite the opposite. The grammar of first, second, and third persons exists here on earth because it first existed on high. That is to say, we have speakers, and spoken-tos, and spoken-abouts precisely because at some time in a distant past God said, “‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’…. So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26f).
It’s not very often in Scripture that God speaks of himself in the plural. In a monotheistic Jewish text like the Bible, even once or twice is enough to get our attention. In fact, I think the only other time it occurs is in today’s passage from Isaiah. Notice how conspicuously God uses both the singular and the plural, when he says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
Now finally, you may say, That’s all very interesting, but of what use is it? I learned the answer to that question one Trinity Sunday at a Catholic Church in Vancouver, when a very wise priest remarked (in a sermon that lasted barely five minutes) that the relations among the persons of the Trinity is the prototype and role model for families and for all other sorts of godly community. Consider, for example, that within the Trinity there is equality of persons but deference to one another in respect of function, and there is no disagreement about what’s good and what’s true. Now there’s a role model for families, and cities, and parliaments, and churches.
But “all have sinned,” says Paul, “and fall short of the image of God” (Romans 3:23). Yes, I know, Paul says that we fall short of the glory of God. But what is that glory of which we fall short, other than the divine image in which we were made? It is this Trinity who made us, whose image we have in so many ways offended, and whose existence so many have denied, who came among us bringing salvation, so that to this same image we, not just individually but as family and community, may one day be restored. Is it any wonder, then, that the Opening Sentence for Trinity Sunday says, “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12
Isaiah 53 is one of the truly purple passages of the Old Testament. On a Christian reading of the Old Testament it describes not only the suffering and death of Jesus but also the purpose of his death: “He was wounded for our transgressions he was bruised for our iniquities the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
Isaiah was a prophet in the Kingdom of Israel seven centuries before Jesus. He prophesied the captivity of Israel in 722 BC and the deportation of its citizens to Assyria. He also prophesied the return of a remnant of those Jews back to their homeland about 200 years later. And he prophesied the establishment at some future time of a righteous kingdom under a divinely anointed leader.
God calls this anointed leader “my servant”. And this servant suffers terribly – despised, rejected, wounded, a lamb to the slaughter, poured out his soul unto death. So we speak of this person as the Suffering Servant. But chapter 53 poses some problems of interpretation: Who is this Suffering Servant? and What is the purpose of his suffering?
Now, suppose you were living in Israel in the time of Isaiah. Suppose you were one of his scribes employed to copy his prophecies. You’re 700 years too early to know about Jesus, so what meaning would you take from this prophecy of the Suffering Servant? Or perhaps you’re a rabbi in Alexandria, the biggest Jewish community outside Israel, 500 years after Isaiah but still 200 years before Jesus – What meaning would you take from the prophecy?
Well, it would be a bit of a puzzle. From other passages in Isaiah you would probably construe the Servant to be, collectively, the Jewish people. Isaiah does speak of the Jews as “my servant, Israel” and “Jacob, my servant.” What about the suffering? Well, certainly the Jews suffered during the Exile. But that was for their own sins. As God’s Servant they were supposed to be his light to the rest of the world, but they had nearly let the light go out. Maybe out of their sufferings a great leader would arise and bring them back to God. Maybe their restoration would bring other nations to seek the God of Abraham and Moses. Maybe. But prophecy tends to be cryptic until it comes to pass.
If you were a modern Jew, you certainly would not see the Suffering Servant fulfilled in Jesus. Because, of course, if you did you would by definition be a Christian. And that’s the last thing you’d want! So, for a Jew the Suffering Servant has to be the Jewish people. Despite all the sufferings inflicted on them over the last 2000 years by a nominally Christian Europe and by Islam, they have survived, and that’s a testimony to the world.
But we know that the earliest Christians read Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Jesus. In Acts 8 we see Philip discussing Isaiah 53:7,8 with an Ethiopian Jew, probably a convert, returning home from one of the annual festivals in Jerusalem. The passage from Isaiah says, “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter” (Acts 8:32). So the Ethiopian asks Philip, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then, Luke tells us, “Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:34f).
But how was Philip justified in making that equation between Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and Jesus? He was justified because that’s how Jesus taught his disciples to read the Old Testament. On one occasion Jesus told some fellow Jews who opposed him, “You search the scriptures, for you think that in them you have eternal life, yet it is they which testify of me” (John 5:39). And a little over a week from now – in the prayer book lections for Tuesday of Easter week – we’ll read again that marvelous story of the walk to Emmaus, where Luke tells how Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, interpreted for them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
We need to be clear that this Christian peculiarity of finding Jesus in Isaiah 53, and other parts of the Old Testament, is not an afterthought. It’s not a meaning imposed on the text years after it was written. It is, rather, a meaning that was in the text from the beginning, but could not be fully understood until Jesus came to fulfill it. Peter says in his first epistle that “the [Old Testament] prophets who prophesied about the grace that would come to you …. inquired into what time or what circumstances the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating when he testified in advance to the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you … (1 Peter 1:10-12).
So we have a Jewish reading of the Servant as God’s covenant people – “my servant, Israel”, “Jacob, my servant” – and we have a Christian reading of the Servant as Jesus the Messiah. And in fact both readings are correct: it’s not a choice of “either-or”, but “both-and”. You can see that in chapter 11 where Isaiah describes Israel in captivity, like a tree chopped down to the stump, and then next season a branch sprouts from that stump to give new life to what looked like a lost cause. “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him…. In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the Gentiles will rally to him, and his resting place will be glory.” (Isaiah 11:1,2,10).
A hundred years later Jeremiah picks up the theme: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely…” (Jeremiah 23:5). Forward another hundred years: the exiles have returned, and Zechariah promises: “Behold, I am going to bring forth my servant the Branch” (Zechariah 3:8).
So there is a covenant people who have been cut off but are going to be reborn in a representative offspring, and this offspring himself will restore God’s covenant people and fulfill the promise given through Isaiah: “Your people shall all be righteous, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands – and they shall possess the land forever – that I may be glorified” (Isaiah 60:21).
Now, except for the fact that Christians see Jesus as the righteous Branch, that explanation of Isaiah 53 might not get much objection from an orthodox Jew – so far. But here we’ve reached the point where the Jews part company with us. For we have to ask the question (and let’s do it in Isaiah’s own words): How “will the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous”? (Isaiah 53:11). Isaiah’s answer is: “By his knowledge shall my righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.” The righteous one knows God’s plan. And he knows what he has to do to fulfill that plan: “It was the will of the LORD to bruise him (53:10). “He shall bear their iniquities” (53:11). “When he makes his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days” (Isaiah 53:10).
The affirmation that “He shall bear their iniquities” is stated as happening in the future. And when Isaiah wrote them back around 720 BC, it still was in the future. But elsewhere in the chapter Isaiah uses a past tense: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his stripes we are healed” (53:5). In the mind of God, long before Isaiah wrote, long before David ruled, long before Moses left Egypt, long before Abraham left Mesopotamia, Good Friday was already a “done deal”.
I got a renewed feeling for the all-encompassing scope of that “done deal” a couple of years ago following our first community barbeque. Our neighbors at Westside Baptist had their barbeque scheduled for the following weekend, so I took them our leftover buns and burgers and a couple of tubs of ice cream. “What do I owe you?” the nice lady asked. And I replied, far too flippantly, “Not a thing. It was all paid for long years ago.” Then suddenly, in a most un-Anglican fashion, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. And in those few intense minutes I understood once again that, apart from Jesus, I would be so alienated from God that I should forfeit all entitlement before him. I saw that, apart from Jesus, I had no claim to even a hamburger or a scoop of ice cream apart from the finished redemption – the buying back – that occurred on that first Good Friday.
When Jesus presided over the Passover dinner on Maundy Thursday, when he gave us the words “This is my body” and “This is my blood”, it’s clear that he saw the meaning of his own death anticipated in the Passover sacrifice. Passover and all the other sacrifices of the Jewish calendar were signposts that pointed the way; Good Friday was the destination.
The meaning of Jesus’ death was not apparent to any of the crowd standing around the cross on Good Friday. A moral transaction of cosmic import was taking place – hell was being harrowed – but all they saw was a pathetic-looking figure crying out such seemingly inconsistent lines as “Father, forgive them” and “Why have you forsaken me?” Even the disciples could not comprehend what was going on, despite the fact that Jesus had told them about it. The significance of Good Friday became clear to them only after the Resurrection – at which point they recognized that all their Jewish sacrifices had been fulfilled, once and for all, in a real time-and-space historical event.
If you were to meet someone who acted as if he thought he were God, and if he told you that his impending death would bring you eternal life, you would quite rightly call a cop, or a psychiatrist. But if, three days after his death, you found yourself – in your right mind – having dinner and conversation with him, your former doubts would vanish, and your world-view – indeed, your life itself – must be forever changed.
Genesis 9:1-17
Luke 13:1-5
If your mind runs to Biblical things, the TV images of recent tsunamis in Japan and elsewhere must make you think about the Biblical story of Noah’s flood. Those TV images certainly make Noah’s flood look a lot more believable than some skeptics might like to admit. When you consider that there are parallels to the Noah story in well over two hundred ancient languages and cultures, it would be hard to argue that they don’t reflect a real event, or perhaps several real events. There’s lots of geological evidence of flooding throughout the ancient world, so even if the Genesis flood did not cover the whole world, it could certainly have covered the whole known world, or at least the whole world known to those who told the story. Then, if you make allowances for the fact that an event retold over ancient centuries will have a different way of telling, and likely a different purpose, from what we get from professional historians and journalists, we can still say that the Genesis account speaks truthfully.
When people experience a disaster like those in Japan, or New Zealand, or a different kind of disaster in Libya, or any dozen other places – whether they’re seeing it from a distance or living through it, or perhaps dying through it – they want to ask, and properly so, Where is God in this? From our relative safety in Hamilton, it’s too easy to give simplistic, even stupid, answers to the question. We can be simplistic and stupid in our unbelief if we think that our answer can exclude God; but we can also be simplistic and stupid if we give a faith answer that would pin God down to some kind of tidy formula. We just don’t know enough about how God stands outside of, but at the same time interacts with, this time-and-space universe, so we are often not able to form any reliable view about what he did or did not do or might or should have done in such and such a situation.
Remarkably, Moses understood that limitation 2400 years ago when he wrote: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God: but those things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29). About 500 years later, the writer of Ecclesiastes said much the same thing: “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet so that no one can fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So we might be wise to confine our confidence about where God is in this to what we can know from Scripture, and not presume to be wiser than we are.
When we read the early chapters of Genesis, we have to remember that Moses (or his scribes and editors) recorded those stories after the Exodus to help the Hebrews make sense of their new role as the liberated people of God. The big events in their lives were escaping through the waters of the Red Sea (or, if you prefer, the Reed Sea), followed by the giving of the covenant on Sinai. As a parallel to those, the big events in Noah’s story were escaping through the waters of the flood, followed by a covenant whose sign was the rainbow. Noah’s rainbow covenant had rules that anticipate the rules of the covenant given to Moses on Sinai. So Moses seems to be saying that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; that people stand in a covenant relationship with him (either as covenant keepers or as covenant breakers); and that for those who keep covenant there is indeed a rainbow after the rain. Of course, the Old Testament understanding of “after” tended to focus on this world, and was rather vague about the world to come – which I think makes their trusting God for promised rainbows even more remarkable.
Of course, the best example of this is Job. Job lost everything, both by natural disasters and by marauding desert nomads. Yet at the end he was still saying, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). Now, it’s clear from the beginning of the story that Job had done nothing to deserve losing his home and his livestock and his family and his health. Job is the poster child for the question: Why do bad things happen to good people? A couple of months ago a preacher on the Christian radio station AM 1250 answered that question by saying, “They don’t. Bad things don’t happen to good people, because there are no good people.” In support of which, he quoted St Paul: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). And of course, at an absolute level he’s right. That’s why we need a Savior. But at a relative level, it’s not a satisfactory answer, because it seems to trivialize all the efforts people make in good faith to obey the commandments. The story of Job says explicitly of Job that “this man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and abstained from evil” (Job 1:1).
So Job gets into a debate with his four friends – a debate that goes on for 35 chapters – in which the friends argue that all the bad things happening to Job indicate some evil secret of which he desperately needs to repent. Job knows that’s not so, but he cannot figure out why God seems to be punishing him. So Job demands his time in court, with God as the presiding judge, so that face to face Job can argue the unfairness of it all. Well, Job gets his encounter with God, but it’s nothing like what he expected. In that encounter, Job comes to understand that neither he nor his friends knows enough about how God interacts with the universe to be able to form any reliable judgment about what God did or did not do or should have done. So Job is vindicated of his friends’ accusations, but his encounter with God is so overwhelming that Job does repent anyway – not of the kinds of sins his friends had in mind, but of presumptuousness.
I had a friend whose wife died while she was still in her prime. In his presumptuousness, he got mad at God, and stayed that way to the day he died. Right to the end he tuned out all talk of God. Now, the problem with getting mad at God in the face of disaster, or with using disaster as an excuse to cut God out of your world-view, is that it reverses the roles of who’s the Judge and who’s the accused. For those of us who believe in the righteous Judge, that’s a really scary reversal.
What we have to believe is that God is sovereign in human history, despite any appearances to the contrary. But God’s sovereignty has an agenda. Paul defined that agenda to the Council in Athens, when he told them that God “has made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, definitely appointing their pre-established periods and the boundaries of their settlements, so that they might seek for God, if only they would grope for him [the way a blind man might] and find him” (Acts 17:26f). If I am reading Scripture correctly, the end-goal of divine providence is not to provide safe technology and prosperity in a Shinto Japan, nor to support democracy and women’s rights in a Muslim Libya, nor even to create better health care in a secular Canada. Those are all good and desirable social conditions, and they deserve our efforts to help bring them about, but their end-goal in God’s providence is to advance the Kingdom of God. What God desires for Japan and Libya and Canada and all other societies is an abundant life, both here and hereafter, that derives from fearing God and following Jesus.
Luke tells us about some people who asked Jesus about two disasters that happened in their own day. One was a natural disaster, in which a tower collapsed and killed 18 people in a suburb of Jerusalem. The other was an act of cruelty, in which Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, slew some political dissidents while they were at worship. In each case Jesus asks rhetorically, “Do you think that these .. were worse sinners than all others .. because they suffered in this way?” And he replies, “No! But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
Like Job, Jesus did not buy the idea that every disaster is a punishment for evil. Some disasters result from the actions of bad people, some are caused by human error, and some are just the forces of nature doing what those forces do. And those forces, Jesus tells us, act equally “on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). But just as human evil and incompetence are aspects of a fallen world, so are the vagaries of nature: Paul tells us that the physical world was “subjected to futility” – read that as “entropy” – in anticipation of a day when “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20f).
So where is God when disaster strikes? God is in the flood and God is in the rainbow. He is in the flood by way of warning: “unless [we] repent, [we] shall all likewise perish”. And he is in the rainbow by way of promise: “God works all things together for good, for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And for both we say: Thanks be to God.
A POSTSCRIPT: After watching the evening news on any given day, you could easily exclude God from your world-view and dismiss the rainbow as polyanna. You might also decline to find God in beauty and goodness and purposeful design in Nature. But though a Christian’s faith includes those things, it does not depend on them. It depends instead on the meaning of Jesus’ death (“he died that we might be forgiven”) and the historical fact of his resurrection. The meaning of his death was not apparent to any of the crowd standing around the cross on that first Good Friday. Even the disciples did not understand it, though Jesus had told them it was so. That meaning became clear only after his resurrection – at which point all the anticipatory stories like Noah’s rainbow and Job’s restoration found fulfillment in a real time-and-space historical event. And that fulfillment anticipates yet another fulfillment, the goal to which all things are leading, when the historical Jesus returns in his Father’s glory to usher in the Kingdom of God. If I were not convinced of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, I would have to reject Job’s restoration and Noah’s rainbow and all other happily-ever-after stories as so much pie in the sky. But if Jesus really did rise from the dead, and if he did that as representative humanity, then in his suffering and triumph our worst fears are dispelled and our fondest hopes will be more than realized. If you would like to explore for yourself the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, I can recommend no more thorough and scholarly work than Bishop N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God'” (Deuteronomy 8:3 John 4:34).
Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and “‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone'” (Psalm 91:11, 12). Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test'” (Isaiah 7:12).
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God (Deuteronomy 6:13) and him only shall you serve'” (1 Samuel 7:3). Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.
_______________________________
According to the gospels, Jesus had told his disciples that saw his mission portrayed throughout the Old Testament (Luke 18:31ff). “All things that are written in the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished” (Luke 18:31; 24:27,44). He saw his mission in Moses’ promise that God would raise up another prophet “like unto [him]” (Deuteronomy 18:15) and in Moses’ biographer’s comment that God had not yet done so (Deuteronomy 34:10). He saw it in Daniel’s Son of Man (Daniel 7:9-13), in King David’s Messianic heir (1 Kings 2:4 Psalm 2:1), and in the Good Shepherd of the 23rd Psalm. But he also saw his mission portrayed in the sacrificial ram caught in the thicket (Genesis 22:1-14), in Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53), and in that agonizing soul who cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22:1)
At his baptism Jesus committed himself formally and publicly to this mission. Baptism was followed immediately by 40 days in the desert. Those 40 days were a deliberate experience. Matthew tells us that the Spirit led Jesus into the desert to experience temptation, or testing. Mark says that “the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness.” Those 40 days were Jesus’ mental dress rehearsal for the three years that followed. They were a time for him to confirm the Messianic identity and mission that had been growing on him since his childhood. He had to confirm not only that he was the Messiah, but what it meant to be the Messiah.
It was a solitary experience. There were no human witnesses. So the story of Jesus’ Temptation is one that Jesus himself must have told to his disciples. It appears to have been the definitive experience that settled the shape and direction of Jesus’ ministry, so they must have talked about it many times. All that we’re told about it is contained in a single anecdote of a mere dozen verses. But I think those dozen verses capture that month and a half in a way that is significant not only for our understanding of Jesus but also for our own spiritual health.
The hills of Judea were a barren desert, an inhospitable place where Jesus experienced not only hunger, but isolation, and the oppressive presence of evil. Isolation breeds strange thoughts. It tempts us to deny what we know – if what we know is out of sight – and to substitute our immediate reality, as if that were all there is. Jesus needed to experience – and to master – this isolation in order to prepare him for the even greater isolation, indeed abandonment, that he would experience three years later.
So after six weeks of hunger, Jesus is tempted to turn stones into bread. Well, bread is a gift of God, so what would be wrong with that? But if Jesus had given in to this kind of need, it would have totally defeated his reason for being out there in the wilderness. He would never have been able to say, “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Now, a prospective Messiah would certainly need public recognition, so Jesus is tempted to do a bungee jump off the top of the Temple – without the bungee. But to rely on a publicity stunt would mean he was having a crisis of faith. It would mean he was no longer confident that “my word that goeth forth out of my mouth shall not return unto me void, but shall accomplish that which I please, and shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (Isaiah 55:11).
As the Davidic king-in-waiting, Jesus is tempted to pursue power by political means – perhaps even Machiavellian means – to bring about that higher public good that he called the kingdom of God. But if he had resorted to political means, he would never have been able to say, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
Given six weeks in the Judean desert, most of us could have been tempted to seize on any expedient. But Jesus knew that those expedients are not the way God works. They’re evil, they’re devilish: for they would replace the eternal and spiritual with the temporal and political – which is nothing less than idolatry. Jesus knew that in his life-and-death struggle with evil, giving in to any one of them would have put an end to his Messianic career even before it got started.
So he responds to the temptations by quoting Scripture, and the verses he quotes go right to the heart of the matter. Each verse is a God-statement – a Scriptural affirmation that God is central in all of life. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Deuteronomy 8:3) “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Don’t trivialize God.) (Isaiah 7:12) “You shall worship the Lord your God (Deuteronomy 6:13) and him only shall you serve” (1 Samuel 7:3).
I think these responses give us a clue how Jesus spent those six weeks of isolation: centered on Scripture, centered on the Kingdom, centered on God.
Now, it’s safe to assume that Jesus told his disciples about that wilderness experience not just to fill in an interesting biographical detail, but because he considered that it was useful knowledge for them. And useful for us, too – because Jesus “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:12). Now, if Jesus was tempted in all points like as we are, then it follows that at least in some points we are tempted as he was. Which means that, whether we realize it or not, we are all engaged at some level in that same life-and-death struggle with evil.
I can’t tell you what evil is, but I think it’s more than just irrationality, and more than just an absence of good. I can’t tell you what the devil is, but I think he’s more than just a metaphor. Paul says that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the cosmic rulers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
If that is so, then, like Jesus, we too need to be constantly centered on God: certainly by being steeped in Scripture, perhaps by a more deliberate use of fasting, but also by seeing in a new light – and using in a fresh way – a piece of liturgy that I think actually reflects Jesus’ wilderness experience. What piece of liturgy did Jesus give us that begins by centering our thoughts on God’s Name, and his will, and his Kingdom that acknowledges our need of daily bread, and that says Jesus wouldn’t wish on us a confrontation with temptation and evil (or “the evil one”) like the confrontation he experienced? Like Jesus, we cope in such times by remembering that the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory always belong to God, and were never the Tempter’s to give. Of course, unlike Jesus, you and I are not “yet without sin”, so for our benefit he had to add that one petition that he had not needed: “Forgive us our trespasses”.
Has the Lord’s Prayer become so familiar that we’ve lost sight of what a powerful instrument Jesus designed it to be? – and what a powerful we need it to be? The 40 days of Lent are a good annual refresher, but the devil doesn’t go on holiday for the other 325. Luke reminds us that after Jesus’ Temptation, the devil left him “until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). So it is with us.
So may I suggest then, that, as you prayer the Lord’s Prayer, you give thought to how it can be an instrument that helps us to share in Jesus’ victory in that wilderness struggle that we face all year long.
John 1:1-18
1,2 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. /The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him / and without him was not anything made that was made.
4 In him was life / and that life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness / and the darkness comprehended it not.
(6,7 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. / The same came for a witness,
to bear witness of the Light, / that all men through him might believe.
8 He was not that Light, / but was sent to bear witness of that Light. )
9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man, / coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, / and the world knew him not.
11 He came unto his own, / and his own received him not.
12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, / even to them that believe on his name:
13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, / but of God.
14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, / and we beheld his glory,
glory as of the only begotten of the Father, / full of grace and truth.
(15 John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, / “This was he of whom I spake,
He that cometh after me is preferred before me: / for he was before me.” )
16 And of his fullness have all we received, / and grace upon grace.
17 For the law was given by Moses, / but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
18 No man hath seen God at any time / the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath made him known.
The Apostle Paul remarks at least twice in his letters (Colossians 3:16, Ephesians 5:19) that Christians in the first-century churches had a practice of “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”. Many New Testament scholars think that this morning’s Gospel reading is an example of such a hymn. To get the liturgical flavor of it, we read it responsively, much as first-century Christians might have sung it or intoned it responsively.
As you see in the bulletin insert, I have used parentheses to show where the Apostle John, who wrote this gospel, has inserted five lines about that other John, John the Baptist, whom God sent to prepare an audience that would be receptive to the ministry of Jesus. Those five lines tell us not only the purpose of John the Baptist, but also the purpose of John the Apostle in writing his gospel, and indeed the purpose of the hymn writer, too, which is: “to bear witness of the Light, that all men might believe.
While it seems clear that John here is quoting a piece of liturgy that he already knew, I think it’s quite likely that John himself is also the author of the hymn that he is quoting. So I’m going to refer to the hymn writer as John, and make the assumption that they actually are the same person.
In its literary style, in its theological thought, and in its use of the Old Testament, this hymn is a very sophisticated piece of writing. It deserves a thorough study that would take us several hours, but for now we’re going to focus on just four of its themes: the Word; the Light; the Glory that dwelt among us; and the sons of God.
In the Greek-speaking world of the Roman Empire, philosophers recognized that the universe seems to display a rational orderliness. They called this principle of order and reason the Logos. English translation: “the Word”. (This Greek word logos is where we get our English word “logic”.) The Greeks did not think of the Logos as a personal God, but Jewish philosophers in the Greek world saw in this idea of the Logos a kind of God-consciousness that they could use to bridge the gap between Judaism and Greek philosophy. Then because the first Christians were Jews, some of them, like John in writing this hymn, naturally adopted the idea.
John begins his hymn by deliberately quoting the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning”. “In the beginning,” he says, “there was this principle of rational orderliness; this rational orderliness belonged to God, and in fact this rational orderliness was God himself. Everything that exists was made by him, and nothing exists that he didn’t make.” For John as a Jew, everything begins with the basic assumption that the orderliness of the universe comes from a personal, rational Creator God.
Now, logos has many shades of meaning, but the most common meaning of logos is simply “word”. So where Genesis says, “In the beginning, God,” John says, “In the beginning, the Word.” We might ask: Why is it appropriate that this rational creative principle should be called “the Word”? Because in Genesis that’s how God created. “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ God said, ‘Let there be a firmament.’ God said , ‘Let the earth bring forth.’” The image of God speaking the universe into existence is a way of saying that God is a rational being and that we exist because he willed us to. The most basic question in philosophy is not, “Is there a God?” but, “Why is there anything?” And the answer is, “Because He said so.”
Having identified the Logos as the Creator, John then introduces the theme of light and darkness. The Logos, he says, is the source of light, “and the light shineth in darkness.” Light has to be John’s next topic here because, in Genesis, after God created the heavens and the earth, “there was darkness upon the face of the deep….and God said, ‘Let there be light.’”
Now, “light” can mean several things, and when John says “light” he means all of them at the same time. There is the physical light that God created in Genesis. There is also intellectual enlightenment. But most importantly, there is spiritual insight, that inward light given by the Holy Spirit. And each sort of light has its opposite sort of darkness. So John tells us that “the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.” “Shineth” is in the present tense, because the light continues to shine, even in the ongoing darkness of a world that “comprehend[s] it not”. Now, it’s certainly true that a lot of folk in our secular age dismiss the gospel because they “comprehend it not”: they just don’t get it. But the Greek word translated “comprehend” can also mean “overcome”. So you will find some modern translations that say, quite correctly, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”, or try as it might, “the darkness could not put it out.”
To John’s Jewish readers, these references to light would also recall passages in the prophet Isaiah, like the familiar “Arise, shine, for thy light is come” (Isaiah 6:1) and “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: ” (Isaiah 9:2). There’s a passage in Isaiah that clearly identifies the Light as God’s Servant, the Messiah: “I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thy hand, and will keep thee, and give thee as a covenant for the people, [and] as a light for the Gentiles” (Isaiah 42:6). Still another passage identifies the Light as God himself: “the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory” (Isaiah 60:19).
So John picks up on these references and says, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man, coming into the world.” The familiar English reading says, “every man that cometh into the world”, which would mean that the true light enlightens “every person who comes into the world”. And that’s true. But the Greek says “coming into the world”, and that contains a deliberate double meaning, so that we can also translate it: “That true light (which enlightens every person) was coming into the world.” Both are correct, but this second option flows with a crescendo into the next line, which says: “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and” – pathetically – “the world knew him not.”
John says that the Logos, or the Word, is the eternal God, the Creator, and the Light that came into the world to enlighten every person. He goes on to say that the Logos, or the Word, “was made flesh and dwelt among us”. Some critics allege that the idea of Jesus as the incarnation of God was a foreign concept imposed on the church in a later century. But you can see from this hymn that the idea already existed in the Christian community even before John began writing his gospel. To any philosophically minded Greek, the idea of the incarnation would have been laughable; to the Jew it was blasphemous. But to the disciples, who were themselves Jews, it was the only plausible explanation of this person with whom for three years they lived and studied and ministered, and whose death and resurrection they witnessed.
I’d like you to see the picture that John has in mind when he says that the Logos “dwelt among us”. The word that we translate “dwelt” comes from the Greek word for a “tent”. So, literally, what John says is that “the Word was made flesh and pitched his tent among us”. Then immediately after that he says, “and we beheld his glory”. Now, if you’ve ever lived in a tent, you know there’s not much glory in smelly sleeping bags, or tripping over your sleeping tent mates in the middle of the night.
But John has in mind a different kind of tent. When he says, “we beheld his glory”, we understand that he is comparing the Incarnation to the tabernacle in the wilderness, that tent the size of a church where the Jews conducted their sacrificial worship in the desert after they left Egypt. The “glory” that John speaks of is the Shekhinah, the Presence of God that inhabited the Holy of Holies – and manifested itself, when they were on the march, as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. John says that the glory they saw in Jesus was like this glory of the Father. Now, when John says “we beheld his glory”, you and I who know the story might think back to John’s being present at such events as the Transfiguration, the Resurrection appearances, the Ascension, and John’s vision on Patmos. But it’s not just “we beheld his glory”, nor even “we beheld his glory like the Father’s glory”, but “we beheld his glory, like the Father’s glory, full of grace and truth”. The miraculous stuff about Jesus is impressive, but it’s the character of the man – a quality of character that is so much more than man – in which the person of God is revealed. I’m not able to sing a hymn like “Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me” without realizing that it isn’t – without realizing that “the beauty of Jesus” is the beauty of holiness, compared to which I can only know myself to be darkness in desperate need of that unbearable Light.
Which, of course, is why Jesus came – first, to his own people, but “his own received him not.” There is a familiarity that breeds contempt. They said: This is the carpenter’s kid. We know his mum and his brothers and sisters. Who does he think he is? “And he could not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief” (Matthew 13:55ff).
“But as many as received him, even to them that believe on his name, to them gave he power to become the sons of God: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Which takes us back to where we started, where John says his purpose is “to bear witness to the Light so that all people might believe.”
John says Jesus made it possible for us to become children of God simply by receiving him, which John says is the same as putting our faith in him, or “believing on his name”. John describes those who believe as having been “born of God”, and a couple of chapters later he records that familiar conversation where Jesus speaks with Nicodemus about being “born again”. Where John describes becoming a Christian as being reborn, Paul describes it as being adopted. Paul says, ”you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father’.” And when we cry ‘Abba, Father,’ “the Spirit himself is bearing witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Romans 8:15f). Whichever metaphor you prefer, it means that we who believe in Jesus have a privileged relationship with God as sons and daughters, and with each other as brothers and sisters, that we did not have before we believed – and this is nothing less than the work of the Holy Spirit on our minds and wills and consciences.
But John warns us not to confuse being children of God with being born of Christian parents. To emphasize the point, he says it three times: “Which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” About sixty years ago the Reverend David du Plessis expressed this important truth in the words “God has no grandchildren.” God has lots of children, but we’re all first generation, because we all have to “believe” and “receive” for ourselves.
When we have believed and received, and walked with Jesus down the years, we come to appreciate just how much “out of his fullness” – that is, out of his divine abundance – “we have all received” – and continue to receive – “grace upon grace.” And isn’t that why we come here every Lord’s Day, speaking to ourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in our hearts to the Lord?
Today is the second Sunday after the Epiphany. What we focus on in the season of Epiphany is God’s making himself known in Jesus and, the flip-side of that, our coming to know him – either coming to know him better or, like the magi, coming to know him for the first time. It’s important to note that when the magi set out from Babylon looking for Jesus, they went not on their own initiative but because God had made him known. He made him known in a way that the magi, as astrologers, would understand, and then they responded to what they saw.
What they saw was not some magic star that defied the laws of physics by traveling across the night sky like a flashlight in the dark. What they saw was more likely a triple conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn against the backdrop of the constellation Pisces – which, as astrologers, they would interpret to mean that a king and protector was going to be born in the land of the Jews. To the magi, this would have been the most exciting astrological discovery of their careers, so they traveled to Judea to find the new king and pay their respects.
Now, you’re going to object that astrology is disreputable humbug. Well, of course it is! But that did not prevent God from timing his events in such a way that the magi – even out of their bad science – would learn an exciting truth that set them on a 500-mile (800-kilometer) journey in search of the newborn King. They went because they understood that they had been made the privileged recipients of an astonishing revelation.
But I wonder how much the magi really understood. Gifts of gold and incense showed they recognized the child was royal and in some sense divine, and the dream that warned them not to go back to Herod would have confirmed the foreboding implied in their giving a gift of myrrh. But they were still men of the old dispensation: they knew they were witnessing a divinely royal birth, but the Cross and Resurrection would be unknown for another 30 years into the future. Did the magi have saving faith? Yes! They believed the intimations that they had received about what God was doing. But could they have given a coherent explanation of his plan of salvation? I don’t think so.
In his poem “The Journey of the Magi”, T. S. Eliot tries to imagine how much they really understood. He has one of them say: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / But…this birth was / … like Death, our death. / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.”
Now, it’s true that in many ways we still “see through a glass darkly”, (1 Corinthians 13:12), and we shall continue to “see through a glass darkly” until we meet the Lord face to face. But for us, on this side of the Cross and Resurrection, the Epiphany – the self-revelation of God in Jesus – is complete in a way that it never could have been for the magi. On this side of the Cross and Resurrection, when someone asks in rhetorical despair, “What is this world coming to?” you and I can wave our hands and say, “I know! Ask me!”
What the world is coming to is Jesus. Paul says in the first chapter of his letter to the Ephesians that God has “made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time: to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1:9,10).
There is a long-standing debate among historians about why civilizations rise and fall. Some attribute it to economic forces; others say it has to do with moral values, or cultural diversity, or human creativity. Some propose the cynical view that “history is just one damn thing after another”. But Paul says here that in the purpose of God history has a goal. Moreover, on this side of the Resurrection, God has actually made known to us what that goal is. That goal is “to unite all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth”. History is his story. And that story will reach its fulfillment when “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15).
Now, it’s an easy thing even for us who believe to store this idea away somewhere in the back of our minds while we get on with the immediate issues of life. But you see in Ephesians 1 that it’s in the forefront of Paul’s mind and it provides the direction for everything he does. You can hear his excitement about it in verses 3 to 14 where, in one Greek sentence that’s 12 verses long he presents a theology of salvation that reads as much like a hymn of praise as it does a statement of doctrine:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and blameless before him,
5 having destined us in love for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ,
according to the purpose of his will,
6 to the praise of his glorious grace
by which he has favored us in his Beloved,
7 in whom we have redemption through his blood,
the forgiveness of our trespasses,
8 according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us,
9 having made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will,
according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ
10 as a plan for the fullness of time,
to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth:
11 in him, in whom we have obtained an inheritance,
having been predestined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will,
12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory,
13 in whom you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation,
and believed in him,
were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,
14 who is the down-payment on our inheritance, until we acquire possession of it,
to the praise of his glory. PERIOD!
Paul is excited. Because God has a plan that encompasses the full extent of human history, time, and the universe. And that plan includes us who believe in Jesus. It’s an infinitely generous plan, more generous than we could ever deserve or imagine: with redemption, and forgiveness, and adoption, and the riches of his grace lavished on us in an eternal inheritance. And that inheritance has a better guarantee that any retirement plan we’ve ever invested in, for Paul says that God has given us the Holy Spirit as “the down-payment on our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.”
How can you be sure you’ve received the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of that eternal inheritance? Because “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” 1 Corinthians 12:3). If you call Jesus your Lord, “you have received the spirit of sonship, whereby we cry ‘Abba, Father.'” And when we cry ‘Abba, Father’, that is “the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15f).
I said that the Epiphany is complete for us in a way that it was not for the magi. It is complete as a public historical event. But in a personal and spiritual way the Epiphany is a continuing experience: Jesus continues to make himself known to us by the Holy Spirit, and we continue to come to know him, and to know ourselves in him. Paul tells the Ephesians, “I do not cease … remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:16ff).
When Paul speaks of “a spirit of wisdom and revelation”, he’s not suggesting that God will reveal more information, as if his revelation in Jesus were in any way insufficient. There’s already quite enough information available. It’s “the eyes of [our] hearts” that need to be “enlightened”. As we open our hearts – that is, our wills, our attitudes – to the Spirit of Jesus working within us, he does give us an assurance of the hope and inheritance to which he has called us. He also gives assurance of “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe”, which I take to mean two things: the confidence that if God could raise Jesus from the dead, he will also do everything else that he promised; and the confidence that he will work in us and through us now as his instruments to build his church and his kingdom here in Hamilton and wherever else he may extend our influence into the wide world.
So my sisters and brothers, pray that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened, that God will give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation to know Jesus: to know the hope and inheritance that await us, and to perceive how he would use us to make him known to an alien people still clutching their gods.
Luke 1:26-56
We live in a skeptical age. We’ve become good at understanding the natural causes of things, and we tend to dismiss anything that smacks of the supernatural. That’s especially true in popular thinking about the Bible and Christianity. So I get pretty excited whenever I discover how to understand some problematic aspect of Scripture in a way that is compatible with our belief that God has actually intervened in the events of this world. That’s what got me excited about the three canticles from the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel.
Strangely enough, I have never had a problem with the idea of the virgin birth. But the canticles – they used to stretch my credulity. For example, Mary hikes over a hundred kilometres from Nazareth down to the hill country South of Jerusalem, and on arrival at Elizabeth’s house, she bursts into song: “My soul doth magnify the LORD….” It would seem more credible if she had asked for a cup of tea and a bath. Later In the same chapter, Zechariah, the priest, Elizabeth’s husband and soon to be the father of John the Baptist, regains his power of speech at John’s circumcision ceremony and immediately intones another canticle: “Blessed be the LORD God of Israel….” If we read Luke superficially, both songs seem to be composed on the spot, off the cuff, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
It reminds me of the Trapp Family, trekking across the Alps. They come across a particularly gorgeous vista and burst into strains of “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” I want to shout back at them, “No they’re not alive with the sound of music. They’re alive with bad guys in grey uniforms, and they want to get you, so I wish you’d be quiet.”
Unlike a stage musical, people in real life don’t just burst into song without prior deliberation, as Mary and Zechariah appear to do. So it’s hardly surprising that some readers of the New Testament think the infancy stories are pious fancy and the canticles are the liturgical invention of a later generation.
Then a couple of years ago I realized that Luke really was a good investigative journalist. I just had not been reading him right. Now, we know that Luke was a physician by profession and that he accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys. Paul calls him “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4.14). Luke tells us at the beginning of his gospel that when he wrote the two-volume work that includes his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, he had access to eye-witness testimony and to previously compiled records of the life and teachings of jesus. So what I’d like to show you over the next three Sunday evenings is how the canticles might have originated in the real-life events of believable people, how Luke got access to those canticles, and whatthose canticles mean for us.
Luke tells us that the angel visited Mary “in the sixth month”. In the sixth month of what? The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy! Now, why does Doctor Luke specify that detail? Because he understands that when pregnant Mary arrives at the house of her even more pregnant cousin, the fetus quickens in Elizabeth’s womb. Luke, the gentile physician, shows how, in a special situation, God can use a natural event, the quickening of a fetus, to announce God’s Messiah, who spiritually quickens all who believe in him.
Luke tells us that both these cousins experienced angelic visitations, and because they’re family, I’m sure they must have sent messages back and forth to each other. So Mary’s arrival to assist Elizabeth through her last trimester, while exciting, is hardly a surprise; it’s a planned event. When Elizabeth says, “Why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” – she’s not really asking a question, because she already knows the answer. It’s a rhetorical way of expressing her joy – not only at having a son but also at having an intimate part to play in God’s Messianic plan.
If you had been a fly on the wall – or a camcorder – at the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth during that last trimester, what would you have seen? Two pregnant cousins: one young, one old) – a priest: who would be mute for nine months, and had to write everything he wanted to say with a stylus on a wax writing tablet (Don’t you think Elizabeth might have counted that a blessing!) – and maybe Joseph the fiance, or maybe Joseph just came for an occasional visit.
And what would they be doing during that last trimester? Sewing baby clothes. Constructing a crib. Furnishing a corner for a nursery. They would talk a lot – visiting and revisiting the stories of their respective annunciations, mulling over what each angelic word might mean. They would make plans for John’s circumcision, plans for Elizabeth’s purification, and plans for a celebration to follow. They would discuss birthing techniques, and how to parent two very special children. Being devout, and members of a clergy family, they would certainly conduct family devotions.
What would family devotions look like in this home? Grace at meals, and sabbath observance, for sure. Perhaps they sang psalms and liturgies. They might even have composed “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”, as Paul describes in Colossians 3:16. The Old Testament depicts women making music on drums and lyres and harps. Certainly, that would have been a suitable way for the childless wife of a priest to occupy herself.
Because these women were devout Jews, the language of the Bible would have been second nature to them. So their words of praise in the Magnificat reflects their knowledge of the Psalms, and also the words of Hannah, who had Samuel in her advanced years. For that reason, the words of the Magnificat apply not only to Mary, but also to Elizabeth. So you can easily imagine the Magnificat taking shape in the home of Elizabeth as two expectant mothers talked about their own experiences and about Biblical role models, and then put these ideas together in their music.
But we still have to ask: How did Luke, 65 years later, get his hands on not only the Magnificat but also such “horse’s mouth” details as the quickening in Elizabeth’s womb and the fact (as he says at the end of Chapter 2) that “(Jesus’) mother kept all these sayings in her heart”? Elizabeth, we’re told, was already “advanced in years”, so she and Zechariah were likely dead by the time when John and Jesus began their ministries at age thirty. Mary would have been in her mid-forties at that time. And If she were still alive when Luke was writing, she would have been at least in her seventies – not impossible, but perhaps unlikely. But if Mary was not alive at this time, then who would know these things and be able to relate them to Luke?
Who better than Mary’s children? Jesus was her firstborn (Luke 2:7), and Joseph “knew her not until she had born [that] son” (Matthew 1:25). But Jesus had at least a half dozen younger siblings: James, Joses, Simon, Jude, and “sisters” (note the plural) as identified in Matthew 13:54. Now, if you know anything about mothers, these siblings would have heard the family stories over and over and over. James, the next oldest, might even have been an eyewitness to Jesus’ being left behind in the Temple. We find this same James as bishop of the church in Jerusalem when Paul, accompanied by Luke, visited there around AD 60 (Acts 21:17; Galatians 1:19). It is entirely possible that Luke found the Jerusalem church using some version of the Magnificat and the Benedictus in their worship services, which may explain why the versions as Luke reports them sound so liturgical.
We still have to ask what the Magnificat means for us, and why we continue to use it in our worship.
First, it ties us back to real historical people and events – without whom, faith in Jesus would be nothing more than a fable, a legend, wishful thinking. Second, the circumstances of those people’s lives remind us that God is down here with us in this sometimes nasty world, sanctifying us and our realities to his glory. Third, there is something really special about being able to offer praise to God in the words of the young woman who bore his Son. Fourth, her words remind us that God keeps his promises of mercy to the humble and meek who fear him. Fifth, those promises tie us back to our Old Testament roots. And finally, Luke would have us understand that the words Elizabeth said to Mary also apply to us: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (1:45).
Luke 1:57-80
This evening we’re going to look at the Benedictus, the second of the three canticles in Luke’s infancy narrative. Last week I neglected to mention the significance of the titles Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc dimittis. So just in case anyone isn’t aware of these, let’s start there.
In the ancient Semitic world, literary works were not identified by titles. They were identified by their first words. We call the first book of the Bible “Genesis”, using the Greek title, but the Jews called it B’reshith, “In the beginning”. We call the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples “The Lord’s Prayer”, but the early Jewish Christians would have called it Avenu, “Our Father”, and the Latin Church followed this practice, calling it Pater noster, So Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc dimittis are simply the first words of these canticles as they appear in the Latin Bible. Magnificat means “It magnifies” that is, “My soul magnifies the LORD”. Benedictus means “Blessed”, as in “Blessed be the LORD God of Israel”. And Nunc dimittis means “Now you are dismissing”, as in “Now you are letting your servant depart in peace”.
Last week I suggested that the Magnificat may have been written jointly by Mary and Elizabeth during the last three months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. In this week’s narrative, John has been born, and we hear the Benedictus while his family and friends are gathered on the eighth day for his circumcision. You remember that Zechariah had been struck dumb because he expressed skepticism about the angel’s promise – that’s “dumb” as in “mute”, of course, not “stupid”. So Zechariah had been communicating with a writing tablet for the past nine months – that’s wax pressed into a wooden frame, and a writing stylus – which is how Elizabeth already knew that the angel had told him to call their son YoHanan – John – “gift of God”.
The circumcision might have been performed at the local synagogue, but the absence of any statement to that effect suggests it more likely took place at home. So let’s try to picture who’s there and what’s happening. The focus of attention is the baby, accompanied by his parents. There’s the mohel (rhymes with “oil”), a religious professional trained to perform circumcisions. It’s the fact that it’s done by an approved mohel that makes it what we would understand as a sacrament, and not just a surgical procedure. Then there’s a male relative who has the honor of holding the baby while it’s being circumcised. There are the godparents, who take the baby from the mother to the mohel. And, of course, there’s an assortment of friends, neighbors, and relatives. The fact that the child is handed off from the mother to the godmother, then to the godfather, who brings him before the mohel and hands him to the man who will hold him during the circumcision, shows that this is not just a private affair, but the child is being received into the covenant community by its appointed representatives.
But wait a minute. Who else attended that circumcision? Whose name is on the guest list that I neglected to mention? That’s right – Mary! Luke tells us (1:56) that Mary remained with Elizabeth for about three months, then returned home. Mary didn’t come all that way just to do household chores; she came to help her cousin through the birth. And after spending three months with Elizabeth, she’s not going to take off a couple of days before the big celebration. Maybe Joseph also came down for the event. Maybe – and here we’re speculating – maybe he and Mary were the godparents, or maybe he got to hold the infant John during the circumcision.
At any rate, the ceremony proceeds, punctuated by prayers and blessings and thanksgivings. After the circumcision, the father is asked to name the child. But of course Zechariah is still mute, so Elizabeth has to answer for him. “John,” she says. “YoHanan” – and everybody thinks, “that’s why we don’t let women do these things – can’t even get her own kid’s name right!” Zechariah motions for a writing tablet and writes, “His name is John.” Instantly Zechariah can speak, and everyone is astonished:
– astonished that Zechariah agrees with his wife about naming the child;
– astonished that they give the child a name that sets him apart from his family;
– astonished that God vindicates this naming by restoring Zechariah’s speech;
and they ask, “What then will this child be?”
This is the point in the ceremony where the father pronounces a blessing on the child, and gives thanks that he has been initiated into the covenant of Abraham. The blessing that Zechariah gives is the canticle that we know as the Benedictus. Luke indicates that when Zechariah pronounced this benediction he was “filled with the Holy Spirit”, that is, speaking under divine inspiration – speaking a prophetic blessing composed under divine inspiration. But being divinely inspired is not the same thing as “winging it”. Zechariah, steeped in the language and history and theology of the Old Testament, had nine months to reflect on this event. And he knew from the angel (1:20) that his inability to speak would last only “until the day these things take place”. So while the women in this Spirit-filled household were composing the Magnificat, Zechariah – writing tablet in hand – was working on the blessing he would pronounce over the son who was soon to be born and circumcised.
Zechariah understands what momentous event is about to take place, for the angel told him that his son would “go before [the LORD] in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” (Luke 1:17) Those are the last words of the last book of the Old Testament, where 400 years earlier Malachi foretold the coming of a new Elijah who would be the forerunner of the Messiah. Zechariah understands that his son will be that new Elijah.
And so he begins:
“Blessed be the LORD God of Israel
for He has visited and made redemption for His people
and raised up a horn of salvation (that is, a mighty salvation) for us
in the house of His servant David.”
But wait a minute! “Visited” – “made redemption” – “raised up a horn of salvation” – that’s not John he’s talking about. Whom is Zechariah looking at as he says this?
At Mary – three months pregnant. Messiah in utero before his eyes.
“Visited” – “made redemption” – “raised up”: That’s Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. Is it any wonder the early Church used this canticle in their liturgy! And even if the Resurrection is a bit of a stretch from what Zechariah could have known at the time, it was no stretch at all for the earliest Christians to read their knowledge of the Resurrection back into the text.
“As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from of old….
to show the mercy promised to our fathers,
and to remember His holy covenant,
the oath that He swore to our father Abraham….”
It was clear to Zechariah that he was witnessing before his eyes the long awaited fulfillment of the prophetic Scriptures, the fulfillment of his people’s covenant, the fulfillment of an oath that God who made it cannot break.
“That we should be saved from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us….
that we…might serve Him without fear,
in holiness and righteousness…all our days.”
Of course, the enemies Zechariah has in mind are the Romans who have over-run the country, and the Greeks who have contaminated their Jewish culture. And these are but the last two in a long series of hostile forces that have dogged the Jews ever since they followed Moses out of Egypt. What I think Zechariah could not foresee was that this hostility would continue, and that not only Jews, but also the Gentile converts who would be called Christians, would be subject to it, and that this hostility would not end until Messiah returns at the end of time.
At verse 76, Zechariah finally turns his attention to John. On a music circuit, John would be called the warm-up act. He goes on first to prepare a people for Messiah’s arrival – a people who have knowledge of salvation, a people who are tuned in to ideas like faith, and repentance, and forgiveness. That’s what John set out to do, and that’s what he achieved.
But when we sing the Benedictus, I think sometimes the verses about John niggle just below the surface of our consciousness with a question something like this: If the main act has come, why are we still singing about the warm-up act at every service of Morning Prayer? Why do we keep repeating Zechariah’s charge to John? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that the Messiah who came will come again, and the charge that Zechariah gave to John now falls to us. This time it’s our job to “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”; it’s our job “to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins.”
But the world we live in – even our so-called “just society” – is still hostile to God and His Messiah and His covenant people. When Zechariah said that John would “guide our feet into the way of peace”, I don’t think he had any idea that a dancing girl would have his son’s head on a platter. The peace that Zechariah hoped for will indeed come, but not until Jesus returns. In the meantime our job is to proclaim sin and salvation to a world that’s becoming increasingly more diverse, increasingly more secular, and increasingly more hostile to the Gospel. One day the dancing girl will be back – with her platter in hand – and when she comes, you and I will be grateful that we had John as a role model, and grateful that we had this canticle to keep us mindful of him.
Luke 2:21-40
This evening we are going to look at the third of the three canticles from Luke’s infancy narrative, the Nunc dimittis, which means “Now you are letting…” – supply the rest of the line – “…your servant depart in peace.” These three canticles originated over a period of about ten months – from Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, to the birth of John three months later, to the purification ceremonies following Jesus’ birth about seven months after that.
When we were looking at the Magnificat and the Benedictus I suggested that, while at first glance they appear to be spontaneous, Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah actually had the time and occasion to compose them deliberately as expressions of praise and blessing. On the other hand, the Nunc dimittis has a brevity that suggests a spontaneous exclamation that got written down some time later. We know that the early Christians used these canticles in worship, because by the fifth century these three appear with a dozen other songs, mostly from the Old Testament, in a collection called the Book of Odes.
In this evening’s reading you see at v.21 that, according to Jewish custom, Jesus was circumcised and given his name on the eighth day. This seems to have happened while they were still at Bethlehem. Then two weeks later they’re traveling 10 km North to Jerusalem (v.22), where this evening’s story takes place. And after that they head back home to Nazareth, 90 km further North (v.39).
So what were they doing in Jerusalem? Luke tells us that they brought Jesus up to Jerusalem “when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses … to present him to the Lord (v.22) … and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons’ ” (v.24).
Notice that Luke speaks of “the time for their purification”: there are two ceremonies going on here, one for Mary, the other for Jesus. As the mother of a newborn, Mary comes to the Temple on the twentieth day, bringing a prescribed animal sacrifice, after which she can resume her participation in the community’s worship. (In modern terms we can compare this to the Anglican service of Thanksgiving After Childbirth, commonly called The Churching of Women.) The prescribed sacrifice in Bible times was a yearling lamb for a burnt offering and a pair of doves or pigeons for a sin offering. Poor folk were allowed to omit the lamb and just bring the pigeons, one for the burnt offering, the other for the sin offering (Leviticus 12). Mary’s offering shows that she and Joseph were poor folk; it also shows that they did not let being poor get in the way of doing their religious duty.
The second ceremony is the presentation of the firstborn male. Luke quotes Exodus 13:2, which says that “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the LORD.” “Called holy to the LORD” means called to serve God in some special way. You see an example of this in the Old Testament when Hannah bears Samuel in her old age, and takes the lad to Eli the priest to be trained for the Temple ministry. So Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple to present him to the LORD for whatever future service God intends.
When they arrived at the Temple, they would have found the usual collection of priests and Levites, fellow-worshippers, vendors and money-changers, Temple police, beggars, tourists, and a handful of Temple groupies. Picture yourself bringing your newborn to church for the first time, and an old man you’ve never seen before comes out of the crowd and says, “May I hold him?” You hesitate, then hand him your child, and he exclaims, “Thank You, God. Now I can die in peace.” Pretty soon this old woman comes up and begins talking to the crowd about your baby. So you can understand how Mary and Joseph might have felt. It’s not as if they didn’t already know that Jesus was special, but still it must have been a disquieting experience.
Luke was scrupulous to include the incident with Anna the prophetess, even though apparently he could get no record of what she said, because, as he understood the gospel from Paul, in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). And that breaking down of distinctions is part of Simeon’s blessing.
When you turn to the actual words of Simeon, you find two clever puns – one in Aramaic, the other in Greek – both double entendres on personal names, which, unfortunately, we cannot reproduce in an English translation. But they’re really there – and to me they look deliberate – which means I think we should take them to be significant.
Jerusalem as an international city was bilingual in much the same way that Montreal is bilingual: Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew, was the local language; and Greek, supplemented by Latin, was the language of commerce and government. Of course, again like Montreal, their official bilingualism was really multilingualism, as we see on the Day of Pentecost, when there were people in Jerusalem speaking every language in the Empire.
But on this day, when Simeon took up the child in his arms, he was praying in Aramaic, or perhaps in Hebrew:
“Now, Lord, you are letting your servant depart in peace,
just as you said you would (2:29),
for my eyes have seen your Yeshua – your salvation” (2:30).
Yeshua is the Hebrew word for “salvation”. “You shall call his name Yeshua,” the angel told Joseph, “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). You can see Mary and Joseph looking puzzled, and thinking, “How did he know the child’s name?” The answer is that God had revealed to Simeon the child’s purpose. God offers us his salvation, his yeshua, in the form of a person – a person called Yeshua. And when he offers his salvation, he is offering us nothing less than himself.
“Now, Lord, you are letting your servant depart in peace,
just as you said you would (2:29),
for my eyes have seen your Yeshua – your salvation – (2:30)
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples (2:31),
a light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel” (2:32).
Simeon looks around the Court of the Gentiles – sees Greeks and Romans and Persians and Africans and Arabs – and understands that this birth is internationally significant: it happened “in the presence of all peoples” because it was happening for all peoples. Simeon rises above ethnic exclusiveness and declares that this single event will be both “the glory of his people Israel” and “a light of revelation to the Gentiles”.
Now that Simeon has concluded his blessing, he slips easily into speaking Greek. (I say that, because the second pun works only in Greek, and if Simeon did not say it, then either Luke is putting words into his mouth, or I’m having a flight of imagination.) Simeon begins by cautioning Mary that her son will bring about “the fall and rising” of many of his countrymen. The Latin Bible translates “fall and rising” as “ruinam et resurrectionem” – “ruin and resurrection”. There is no middle option – Jesus will be our resurrection or he will be our ruin. If we will not have him for the one, we must have him for the other.
Now, that’s not a popular view in our society or in the modern church. It was not a popular view in Simeon’s day either. It’s a view that runs contrary to modern-day pluralism. It’s a view that got early Christians labeled as “haters of humanity”. Simeon anticipates Jesus’ saying that “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
Because Simeon understands the hatred of God that fills many hearts, he recognizes the opposition and the hostility that Jesus will later experience, and the consequent pain that Mary will experience.
“..this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, so that thoughts of many hearts may be revealed – and a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (2:34f).
Simeon has spent a lot of years anticipating the “consolation of Israel” (2:25). That’s a roundabout way of saying the coming of Messiah. Simeon understands something of the hostility that Jesus will experience, because, as an elderly eccentric who holds views and values that go against the current (yes, it takes one to know one), he – and presumably also Anna, the prophetess – have experienced such opposition themselves.
Why do I think that’s what he means? I think it because I see him making a pun on his name that seems to say so. Simeon says that Jesus is going to be “a sign that is opposed”. The Greek word for “sign” is “seemeeon” – from which we get the English word “semiotics”. Our speaker’s name is also “Seemeohn”. The spellings in Greek are different, but in popular Greek speech the pronunciations are almost identical. So Seemeohn, the speaker, says that Jesus is going to be a seemeeon, a sign, that will be opposed.
This is more than just word games. Simeon sees that not only Jesus but all who are waiting for him, and all who would follow him, can expect hostility. It can be the wholesale slaughter of African Christians by Muslim fanatics; or thugs in the United Kingdom destroying the historic Glastonbury yew; it can be as polite and subtle as Waterloo Regional school trustees arguing Charter rights in support of a motion to ban the distribution of Gideon Bibles.
Simeon was right, and he speaks truth to our present age: Jesus is a magnet for opposition, and so are we who believe and follow him, because the gospel lays bare the thoughts of hearts that resist God. The persecution that Simeon spoke of did indeed come in his time and place, and we have no reason to think it will not come in ours. But when or whether it comes, or no, we can say – and sing – with confidence: “Now, Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your Yeshua.”
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)
Sometimes we come across a Scripture passage that does not fit our comfortable assumptions about how things ought to be. Some of us may find Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats a bit like that. You may wonder, for example, why the lectionary would spoil the warm and fuzzy of the week before Christmas with a parable about the Last Judgment.
The answer, I think, is that celebrating Jesus’ birthday is not the same as celebrating any other public figure’s birthday. We continue to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday on the “two-four” weekend, but the grand Empire she presided over has long since had its day and ceased to be. But at Christmas, we’re not just celebrating a grand thing that’s past. We’re celebrating the grandest thing imaginable, that is still to come – because Jesus, whose coming we celebrate, is coming again. Not “again and again and again”, as in some annually recurring myth. But rather, as the angel said at his ascension, “this same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). At Christmas, we celebrate a real time-and-space historical coming that awaits its fulfillment in a second installment. And Jesus says that the second installment will include a Judgment.
But the Judgment theme in this parable is out of sync with the inclusivist views that are widely accepted as politically correct not only in the secular world but even in some major churches. Jesus says that when he returns “he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” He will say to the sheep, “Come you blessed of my father,” and to the goats he will say, “Depart from me.” But the politically correct view is that we’re all sheep, and there are no goats.
Well, if there are no goats, then there’s no need of a Judgment, and no need for the King to say “Depart from me.” In which case, we have no need of a Savior. But then those of us who come to church have to ask: What are we doing here? More importantly, we have to ask: What in the world was Jesus doing here?
He thought that what he was doing here was “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). He thought that he had come “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). He held the politically incorrect view that “if you believe not that I AM, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24). Even the Christmas angels were politically incorrect. Their promise was not the familiar “peace and good will to [all] men” (Luke 2:14). It was “peace to men of good will” (Vulgate) or “peace to men with whom he is well pleased” (English Revised Version, and most others).
Jesus knew we would fall for wishy-washy inclusivist thinking. He even warned us of the error before it occurred. He said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” (Matthew 10:34,39). Of course, this was not what Jesus desired. It was what he knew would happen as soon as people started believing in him.
Yes, Christmas is a family celebration. But Jesus has redefined the notion of “family”. When somebody told Jesus that his mother and his brothers were looking for him, he said, “Who are my mother and my brothers? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, ‘Look, there are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven, that’s my brother, and my sister, and my mother” (Matthew 12:47-50).
So in Jesus’ world-view there really is a distinction between sheep and goats. Goats is the default position, but the good news is that by his grace we may actually choose to be of his sheep and in his family.
Jesus tells us in this parable how he will recognize his sheep and his family. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in….”
“Lord,” ask the astonished sheep, “when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?”
“Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
When Jesus said “these my brothers”, he must have been pointing to persons who were present to his hearers. “These brothers” were the little band of students who accompanied him for three years, his disciples, who would be proclaiming him as the risen Savior, and who would experience hardship and persecution for doing so. Some time earlier Jesus told those disciples much the same thing: “Whoever receives you receives me…. Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward…. And whoever gives one of these little people even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward” (Matthew 10:40,42).
So when Jesus speaks of feeding and clothing and visiting, he is not in this instance promoting a social gospel – though there is ample grounds for that elsewhere. Neither is there anything here about finding Christ in every person. Indeed, the passage assumes that in some people he’s conspicuously absent. What Jesus is saying here is that we’ll be judged on how we have received his gospel, and that a fair measure of how we receive his gospel is how we treat others who believe in Jesus.
So as we prepare our hearts once again to celebrate his birth, let us also consciously celebrate the promise of his coming again. And let us seek to do good to all people, but especially to those that are of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10).
St George’s Church, Hamilton
18 April 2010
Whenever I read a passage like Psalm 2, it takes me back to a New Testament course at the Anglican Theological College in Vancouver. One day in class, a professor said something that didn’t sit quite right, so I put up my hand and raised the question, “What about the Messianic prophecies in the Psalms?” To which the professor replied, “I don’t think there are any Messianic prophecies in the Psalms.”
In Luke 24, during two separate post-resurrection appearances – first on the road to Emmaus, and later with a collection of disciples at Jerusalem – Jesus said, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
So regardless of what the professor thought, Jesus thought that the Old Testament had things to say that applied to him. And that’s the consistent view of all the writers of the New Testament. How could it be otherwise? In Jesus’ day there was no New Testament. The Old Testament was the only Bible that they had that could inform their understanding of what God was doing in the world.
Psalm 2 actually says that it is Messianic. (You can follow this discussion on page 331 of the Psalter in your Book of Common Prayer.) “Why do the nations so furiously rage and why do the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed….”
So how is that Messianic? If you read the last phrase of verse 1 in the original Hebrew, it says “against the LORD and against his Messiah”. The Hebrew word “Messiah” means “Anointed” – whence the translation. Or if you read it in the Septuagint, that pre-Christian Greek translation of the Old Testament, you’ll see that it says, “against the Lord and against his Christ”. The Greek word “Christos” means “Anointed”. So clearly there is a Messianic reference here. But we have to ask: Who is this Messiah, this Christos, this Anointed of the LORD, that the Psalmist is referring to?
Psalm 2 is thought to be an enthronement psalm, a psalm chanted by the priests of the Temple at the coronation of the Hebrew kings, who were God’s anointed. This psalm might even have been written by David for the coronation of his son Solomon. So in the sense of the king as God’s anointed agent, Psalm 2 is Messianic. But if we are going to call it a messianic prophecy, then we have to ask: How is it also prophetic? It is prophetic, I would suggest, by a combination of two things: by the fact that God made a promise, and by the apparent failure of that promise.
We see the promise for the first time at 2 Samuel 7:12ff, where God through the prophet says to David, “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” Psalm 2 expands that promise at verse 8 to include all the nations of the world: “Desire of me and I shall give thee the nations for thy inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.” So in the sense that a promise looks forward, and with the assurance that God keeps his promises, a line like “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” is prophetic.
Except that the promise seems to have failed. The Hebrew kingdom did not continue forever. Wise Solomon at the end of his life behaved most unwisely. He compromised both his faithfulness and his kingdom with too many wives, most of them foreign, and humored them by building temples to their pagan gods. In the centuries that followed, the kingdom was divided, and with few exceptions it was a religious and political failure. The kings didn’t keep the faith. Moses had given rules for a “just society” but they were disregarded. Even some priests and prophets were corrupt. But this failure is in itself also prophetic. It is prophetic because it shows that human leadership is incapable of achieving the “just society”, and human leadership is certainly not capable of achieving the kingdom of God.
Have you ever been in a situation, perhaps at work, where you knew that if you wanted some particular task to be done right – read that as, to be done your way – you were going to have to do it yourself? Well, Isaiah describes just such a situation in Chapter 59: “The LORD saw it” – where “it” refers to the condition of the Hebrew nation – “and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and he was appalled that there was no one to intercede. Then his own arm brought him salvation….” So the failure of the Hebrew kingdom is prophetic in the sense that if God’s promise is going to be fulfilled, it will take a greater than Solomon to achieve it.
Fast forward to the First Century. Mary was a mother, and as a mother she must surely have told her son stories about his birth and about the birth of his cousin John. There stories must surely have raised questions like, Who am I? and What am I supposed to do? Questions to which, throughout his life, Jesus would seek answers in the Scriptures that he came to believe spoke about him. You can see snippets of his wrestling with the Scriptures over such questions during those forty days in the wilderness that followed his baptism – which I think was the climax of a process that gave us those statements in Luke 24 about finding himself portrayed in Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.
The Who? question was resolved at his baptism, when the voice spoke from heaven quoting Psalm 2: “Thou art my son….” The What? and How? questions were resolved in the desert, where the gospels tell us that the devil tempted him by misusing Scripture, and Jesus beat him back by using other Scriptures correctly.
Some time later, on the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, Jesus gets this confirmation once again: “This is my son….”
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews understands this Psalm the same way Jesus did: “To what angel did God ever say, ‘Thou art my Son. Today have I begotten thee.” And a verse later, just to make sure we understand his Christology, he adds: “And again, when he brings his firstborn into the world” – that’s Christmas Day he’s speaking about – “he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.'”
In Acts 4, Peter, in a prayer, quotes Psalm 2 word for word from the Septuagint as a statement about Jesus: “Sovereign Lord, who made heaven and earth, who by the mouth of our Father David, thy servant, didst say by the Holy Spirit, ‘Why did the heathen rage and the peoples imagine vain things? The kings of the earth set themselves in array and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Christ’ – for truly in this city they were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus….'”
In Acts 13, Paul not only quotes Psalm 2, but he even gives us a footnote! Preaching at a synagogue in Asia Minor, he says, “What God promised to our fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus. As also it is written in the second psalm , ‘Thou art my son. Today I have begotten thee.'”
Psalm 2 concludes with a prophetic and Messianic anticipation of the day that St John – and Handel – describe: the day when “the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever.” In fact, there are two words at the beginning of verse 12 that are so conspicuously “New Testament” in flavor that, around 1950, Bible translators and Prayer Book revisers descended into a quarter century of madness during which they left them out. The two words are nashqu bar, “kiss the Son.” A footnote in the RSV says that the Hebrew text here is “uncertain”; in fact, the only peculiarity is that the writer has used an Aramaic word for “son” instead of the Hebrew word. I think the real problem is that the translators could not believe that an Old Testament writer might actually have said such a thing. The kiss referred to is a gesture of reverence or submission, like the old tradition of kneeling before your bishop and kissing his ring. Happily, those words have been restored in the best modern translations, and that’s how I’m going to read them as we conclude. You can follow in your Prayer Book on p.332.
“Be wise, therefore, O ye kings. Be warned, ye that are judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and bow down to him with reverence. Kiss the Son lest he be angry and ye perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.” And for all who do so, this word of assurance: “Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.” Amen.
St George’s Church, Hamilton
16 May 2010
Daniel 7:1,9-10,13-14
Mark 14:55-64
Revelation 1:9-19
There is a well-known saying about the Bible, that the New Testament is contained in Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New. You may have memorized it in these words: “The New Testament is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.” You can see how that is so in our readings of Daniel’s vision in Babylon and John’s vision on Patmos. In Mark 14 Jesus shows us how those passages should be interpreted together.
Daniel was a prophet in Babylon during the years of Exile. He tells us that his visions occurred during the first year of Belshazar’s reign, which dates them at 553 BC. He had, he says, dreams and visions in the night as he lay in his bed, and then he says he wrote what he saw – which is what we have in the book of Daniel. Daniel had visions of four beasts – grotesque symbolic creatures – that signify the four major kingdoms or empires that oppressed God’s covenant people: Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman. The beasts are defeated and brought before divine Judgment, after which God establishes his everlasting kingdom.
Daniel’s description reads like a piece of Divine theatre. Picture the stage at Stratford, complete with property guys, costumes, and special effects, but located but somewhere out in the cosmos. “As I looked, thrones were set in place….” – Can you see the property guys lugging big thrones out to centre stage? – “and the Ancient of Days took his seat…” The royal court is about to be convened. – “His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him….” Costume and special effects combine to convey, however imperfectly, the majesty of God. “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him….” – that’s why you have to move the stage out of Stratford and into the cosmos – “The court sat in judgment [on the four beasts that symbolized the four empires] and the books were opened.”
After the Judgment on the four beasts, Daniel describes Scene Two, in which a hero comes on stage and is presented before the throne. “With the clouds of heaven [picture the special effects] there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.” The expression “son of man” is a poetic Hebrew way of saying “a man”. But, of course, in the circumstances, this man is the promised messianic offspring of David. So what we have here is the description of an investiture. “And to [this Man] was given dominion and glory and a kingdom; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
As Daniel understands it, all the events of history – including everything you see on your daily news channel and everything you read in the daily press – move forward to this one conclusion: the final vindication of God and of his people. No more wandering in the desert no more fighting off the hostile inhabitants of the land no more Exile.
Forward 500 years to Patmos, an island off the coast of Turkey, where the Apostle John is in exile because the government did not approve of his preaching. John says, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day….” The apostle was attending a Sunday worship service. “In the Spirit” suggests that the Holy Spirit had caught him up in an ecstatic trance state in which he saw the unseeable, couched in familiar imagery. He says, “I saw…one like a son of man, clothed in a long robe, with a golden sash across his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like wool, like snow. His eyes were a flame of fire….”
John’s vision borrows imagery from Daniel’s, but not without some differences. “One like a Son of Man” is a reappearance of Daniel’s Messianic figure, but he reappears with a golden sash across his chest. Think back to the royalty you have seen on stage at Stratford – colored sash over the shoulder and joined on the opposite hip – in John’s day a symbol of Imperial power. Daniel’s promise of “dominion and glory and a kingdom” is here fulfilled. This son of man is the long expected King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
But notice this difference: “The hairs of his head were white, like wool, like snow.” The Messiah may be like a son of man, but this picture shows him to be significantly more than a man. “White hair” identifies him with Daniel’s Ancient of Days: “Thrones were placed [says Daniel] and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool.” The Jesus whom John sees is the universal Emperor precisely because he is the King of the Universe – as in the Jewish prayers that begin, “Blessed art thou, O LORD our God, King of the Universe….” It’s no wonder John says, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead”
Now, a Jew reading Daniel 7 will tell you that the Son of Man is a man, who some day in God’s good time will establish peace on earth. But the Son of Man is human, the Ancient of Days is divine, and the two are separate and distinct. That is certainly a possible reading of Daniel 7. So how do we get from that understanding of the Son of Man to John’s understanding, where hair white like snow, eyes of fire, a face shining like the sun, and the Word of God coming from his mouth in the image of a two-edged sword depict Jesus as the Ancient of Days, as Godhead ?
When you read the gospels, you find that Son of Man is the label Jesus preferred. It had less baggage than other things Jesus could have called himself. In first-century Palestine, a messiah could have been seen as a revolutionary. And the prevalence of Greek culture in Jesus’ day made the title “Son of God” open to misunderstanding. But “Son of Man” was a term that Jesus could fill with his own meaning, as indeed he did. We know how Jesus understood the term “Son of Man”, and we know how he interpreted Daniel 7, because in Mark 14, at his trial before Caiaphas, Jesus cites Daniel 7 as a reference to himself: “Now the chief priests and the whole Council were seeking evidence against Jesus to put him to death, but they found none. Many bore false witness against him, but their testimony did not agree. [And Jesus] remained silent…. [Then] the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ – [Are you the Messiah] – the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ Then [Caiaphas] the high priest tore his garments and said, ‘What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your verdict?’ And they all condemned him as deserving death.” (Mark 14:55-64)
“You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power ” – Where did Jesus get that? Jesus knew his Bible, and he knew that Daniel says “thrones were set in place” – thrones, in the plural – one for the Ancient of Days, the other for the Son of Man, who is about to be invested with dominion and glory and kingship. He also knew Psalm 110:1, where God says, “Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool.”In the presence of Majesty, mere mortals stand, bow, kneel, or fall on our faces, but Jesus claims the prerogative of being seated – as we say in the Creed – “at the right hand of the Father”.
Such an outrageous claim by a man on trial for his life necessarily polarizes all who hear it. It compels us to identify either with Caiaphas, who rejected Jesus’ claim as false and offensive – or perhaps delusionary, but still offensive – or with John, who fell at his feet, felt the hand of Jesus on his shoulder, and heard him say “Fear not. I am the first and the last and the living one. I died, but see: I am alive forevermore. And I hold the keys of death – and the grave.” For which we say: Thanks be to God.
1 Samuel 17
In his letter to the Romans (15.4), Paul says that “..whatever things were written aforetime” – he is referring here to the Old Testament – “were written for our instruction, so that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”
It follows from this that the account of David and Goliath should have something to say to us as Christians. But when we read an Old Testament passage as Christians, we should first try to understand what the passage meant to its original Hebrew audience, and that can help us understand how it applies to Christians. If we neglect what the passage meant to its original audience, we risk reading into it supposedly Christian meanings that may not really be there.
As we consider the account of David and Goliath, we should be aware that in the Hebrew Bible the two books that we call First and Second Samuel were originally all one book that should read as a single continuous narrative. When we do that we find that the Book of Samuel is about the establishment of the Hebrew people as a covenant theocracy – a nation that not only acknowledges God, but for whom God actually makes the rules. The high point of the story occurs at 2 Samuel 7, where King David tells Nathan the Prophet that he proposes to make a house for the LORD – a permanent place of worship to replace the tent that they used in the wilderness. So Nathan consults God, and God sends him back to tell David:
10 I will appoint a place for my people Israel and I will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more 11 And I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house: 12 I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
When we turn back 20 years from that point in the narrative to the Goliath story, we see David as a youth, already displaying the heroic qualities that will make him a fit king for God’s covenant people. But in spite of David’s heroic qualities, notice what God emphasizes through the prophet: I will appoint a place for my people I will plant them I will give you rest from your enemies and I the LORD will make you a house. So David is God’s agent, but it is God who plans and God who makes things happen.
Of course, the kingdom in the mind of the writer is an earthly nation-state. But after the days David and Solomon that earthly kingdom experienced more failure than success because its leaders kept neglecting the covenant. Twice in its history the house of God that David wanted to build was destroyed by invading armies – first during the Exile, and second following the Resurrection. But that did not mean that God had failed his promise to establish David’s throne forever. It meant instead that maybe an earthly kingdom was at best only an interim goal maybe we should be looking for a descendant of David who could credibly say, My kingdom is not of this world (John 18.36).
Now, the writer of the Book of Samuel has some very definite ideas about how God builds his kingdom. And if we understand that earthly kingdom as an object lesson that looks forward to God’s everlasting kingdom, then the Book of Samuel has things to teach us about how God wants to build his kingdom even among us at St George’s. I can see at least four insights that the author of Samuel gives us in David’s victory over Goliath – and you may very well find more.
First: God builds his kingdom by means of providence. I once asked Dr A. W. Tozer – a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in Toronto back in the 1960s – how he understood the notion of providence. “Providence,” said Dr Tozer, “is God playing his checkers.” God knows every piece that’s on the board, and every possible move and God uses that knowledge so that the game plays out the way he wants it.
Long before David became king, God in his providence was positioning him to gain the knowledge and the visibility and the credibility that he would need for the job. David “just happened” to be available to play music that would soothe King Saul when his fits of schizophrenia came on him. And that exposure gave David first-hand knowledge of what went on in the king’s court. David “just happened” to be bringing a CARE package to his brothers on the battlefield when Goliath proposed his challenge of single combat. And Saul “just happened” to offer his daughter Michal as the prize for the hero who could beat Goliath, thereby locking in David’s claim to the throne.
In that respect, nothing has changed. As God works among us, we find ourselves in situations that invite us to do things for his kingdom. They may be as simple as an opportunity to show hospitality or to do some kindness – perhaps just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Of course, we can dismiss such things as coincidences, but I remember a chap who used to say, “Yes, they may be coincidences but when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.” So pray that God will make us sensitive to the coincidences that he sends us, so that we will use them for the building of his kingdom.
Second: David was insignificant, but he was God’s choice for the job. He was the youngest of eight brothers, a mere kid who looked after sheep while his three eldest brothers served in the army. They didn’t mind that he brought them CARE packages from their father, but as soon as David showed interest in the Goliath problem, they accused him of slacking and told him to get back to the sheep where he belonged. They were afraid of Goliath like everyone else, but they were not going to be upstaged by their kid brother.
It is not an accident that David had this underling role. God delights in using those whom the world counts as insignificant. 26 For consider your calling, brethren, says Paul to the Corinthians, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are – why? – 29 so that no flesh should glory in his presence. (1 Corinthians 1)
Third: David’s success did not depend on numbers nor on the latest human methods, but on God’s sufficiency. When David’s friend Jonathan and his armor bearer attacked a Philistine garrison single-handedly, Jonathan said: Nothing can hinder the LORD from saving by many or by few (1 Samuel 14.6). Even by the standards of 1063 BC David’s weaponry was primitive. How could he compete against Goliath with a mere slingshot? When he turned down the use of Saul’s armor, he explained tactfully that he wasn’t skilled in using it. What he really meant was that he believed that God had already given him the tools he needed for the task that God had called him to do.
“You come to me,” David said to Goliath, “with a sword and a spear and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, whom you have defied.” And David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone. There was no sword in the hand of David (1 Samuel 17:46,50).
Whatever God may call us to do – even here at St George’s – is possible within the skills and resources and numbers that God has given us – or, in his providence, will give us. This is true for us corporately as a congregation, and individually in the ministries that he intends for each and every one of us.
Fourth, and most importantly: God did not send David out to do a job in his own strength and wisdom. The writer tells us that as soon as Samuel had anointed David to be Saul’s successor, the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward (1 Samuel 16.13). This was not a one-off occurrence; it is part of the divine modus operandi; it is how God works. In the same way, when Saul was anointed 30 years earlier, Samuel told him that he would meet a group of prophets and then the Spirit of the LORD will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man (1 Samuel 10.6). The writer also tells us that after Saul disobeyed God’s word through the prophet, and God rejected him from being king, the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16.14). Four hundred years later, when the Jews returned from Babylon to rebuild the Temple and the nation, Zechariah gave them the same word: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:1).
These are some of the keys to building God’s kingdom, whether 3000 years and half a world away, or here in Hamilton. As we seek to be and to build God’s church where we live, may we pray for, and may he grant us, the working of his providence, the discernment to know his will, confidence in his sufficiency, and the empowering of his Spirit – for Jesus’ sake, who said, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16.18).
istorians about why civilizations rise and fall. Some attribute it to economic forces; others say it has to do with moral values, or cultural diversity, or human creativity. Some propose the cynical view that “history is just one damn thing after another”. But Paul says here that in the purpose of God history has a goal. Moreover, on this side of the Resurrection, God has actually made known to us what that goal is. That goal is “to unite all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth”. History is his story. And that story will reach its fulfillment when “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15).
Now, it’s an easy thing even for us who believe to store this idea away somewhere in the back of our minds while we get on with the immediate issues of life. But you see in Ephesians 1 that it’s in the forefront of Paul’s mind and it provides the direction for everything he does. You can hear his excitement about it in verses 3 to 14 where, in one Greek sentence that’s 12 verses long he presents a theology of salvation that reads as much like a hymn of praise as it does a statement of doctrine:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and blameless before him,
5 having destined us in love for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ,
according to the purpose of his will,
6 to the praise of his glorious grace
by which he has favored us in his Beloved,
7 in whom we have redemption through his blood,
the forgiveness of our trespasses,
8 according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us,
9 having made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will,
according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ
10 as a plan for the fullness of time,
to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth:
11 in him, in whom we have obtained an inheritance,
having been predestined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will,
12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory,
13 in whom you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation,
and believed in him,
were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,
14 who is the down-payment on our inheritance, until we acquire possession of it,
to the praise of his glory. PERIOD!
Paul is excited. Because God has a plan that encompasses the full extent of human history, time, and the universe. And that plan includes us who believe in Jesus. It’s an infinitely generous plan, more generous than we could ever deserve or imagine: with redemption, and forgiveness, and adoption, and the riches of his grace lavished on us in an eternal inheritance. And that inheritance has a better guarantee that any retirement plan we’ve ever invested in, for Paul says that God has given us the Holy Spirit as “the down-payment on our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.”
How can you be sure you’ve received the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of that eternal inheritance? Because “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” 1 Corinthians 12:3). If you call Jesus your Lord, “you have received the spirit of sonship, whereby we cry ‘Abba, Father.'” And when we cry ‘Abba, Father’, that is “the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15f).
I said that the Epiphany is complete for us in a way that it was not for the magi. It is complete as a public historical event. But in a personal and spiritual way the Epiphany is a continuing experience: Jesus continues to make himself known to us by the Holy Spirit, and we continue to come to know him, and to know ourselves in him. Paul tells the Ephesians, “I do not cease … remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:16ff).
When Paul speaks of “a spirit of wisdom and revelation”, he’s not suggesting that God will reveal more information, as if his revelation in Jesus were in any way insufficient. There’s already quite enough information available. It’s “the eyes of [our] hearts” that need to be “enlightened”. As we open our hearts – that is, our wills, our attitudes – to the Spirit of Jesus working within us, he does give us an assurance of the hope and inheritance to which he has called us. He also gives assurance of “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe”, which I take to mean two things: the confidence that if God could raise Jesus from the dead, he will also do everything else that he promised; and the confidence that he will work in us and through us now as his instruments to build his church and his kingdom here in Hamilton and wherever else he may extend our influence into the wide world.
So my sisters and brothers, pray that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened, that God will give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation to know Jesus: to know the hope and inheritance that await us, and to perceive how he would use us to make him known to an alien people still clutching their gods.
Luke 1:26-56
We live in a skeptical age. We’ve become good at understanding the natural causes of things, and we tend to dismiss anything that smacks of the supernatural. That’s especially true in popular thinking about the Bible and Christianity. So I get pretty excited whenever I discover how to understand some problematic aspect of Scripture in a way that is compatible with our belief that God has actually intervened in the events of this world. That’s what got me excited about the three canticles from the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel.
Strangely enough, I have never had a problem with the idea of the virgin birth. But the canticles – they used to stretch my credulity. For example, Mary hikes over a hundred kilometres from Nazareth down to the hill country South of Jerusalem, and on arrival at Elizabeth’s house, she bursts into song: “My soul doth magnify the LORD….” It would seem more credible if she had asked for a cup of tea and a bath. Later In the same chapter, Zechariah, the priest, Elizabeth’s husband and soon to be the father of John the Baptist, regains his power of speech at John’s circumcision ceremony and immediately intones another canticle: “Blessed be the LORD God of Israel….” If we read Luke superficially, both songs seem to be composed on the spot, off the cuff, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
It reminds me of the Trapp Family, trekking across the Alps. They come across a particularly gorgeous vista and burst into strains of “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” I want to shout back at them, “No they’re not alive with the sound of music. They’re alive with bad guys in grey uniforms, and they want to get you, so I wish you’d be quiet.”
Unlike a stage musical, people in real life don’t just burst into song without prior deliberation, as Mary and Zechariah appear to do. So it’s hardly surprising that some readers of the New Testament think the infancy stories are pious fancy and the canticles are the liturgical invention of a later generation.
Then a couple of years ago I realized that Luke really was a good investigative journalist. I just had not been reading him right. Now, we know that Luke was a physician by profession and that he accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys. Paul calls him “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4.14). Luke tells us at the beginning of his gospel that when he wrote the two-volume work that includes his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, he had access to eye-witness testimony and to previously compiled records of the life and teachings of jesus. So what I’d like to show you over the next three Sunday evenings is how the canticles might have originated in the real-life events of believable people, how Luke got access to those canticles, and whatthose canticles mean for us.
Luke tells us that the angel visited Mary “in the sixth month”. In the sixth month of what? The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy! Now, why does Doctor Luke specify that detail? Because he understands that when pregnant Mary arrives at the house of her even more pregnant cousin, the fetus quickens in Elizabeth’s womb. Luke, the gentile physician, shows how, in a special situation, God can use a natural event, the quickening of a fetus, to announce God’s Messiah, who spiritually quickens all who believe in him.
Luke tells us that both these cousins experienced angelic visitations, and because they’re family, I’m sure they must have sent messages back and forth to each other. So Mary’s arrival to assist Elizabeth through her last trimester, while exciting, is hardly a surprise; it’s a planned event. When Elizabeth says, “Why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” – she’s not really asking a question, because she already knows the answer. It’s a rhetorical way of expressing her joy – not only at having a son but also at having an intimate part to play in God’s Messianic plan.
If you had been a fly on the wall – or a camcorder – at the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth during that last trimester, what would you have seen? Two pregnant cousins: one young, one old) – a priest: who would be mute for nine months, and had to write everything he wanted to say with a stylus on a wax writing tablet (Don’t you think Elizabeth might have counted that a blessing!) – and maybe Joseph the fiance, or maybe Joseph just came for an occasional visit.
And what would they be doing during that last trimester? Sewing baby clothes. Constructing a crib. Furnishing a corner for a nursery. They would talk a lot – visiting and revisiting the stories of their respective annunciations, mulling over what each angelic word might mean. They would make plans for John’s circumcision, plans for Elizabeth’s purification, and plans for a celebration to follow. They would discuss birthing techniques, and how to parent two very special children. Being devout, and members of a clergy family, they would certainly conduct family devotions.
What would family devotions look like in this home? Grace at meals, and sabbath observance, for sure. Perhaps they sang psalms and liturgies. They might even have composed “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”, as Paul describes in Colossians 3:16. The Old Testament depicts women making music on drums and lyres and harps. Certainly, that would have been a suitable way for the childless wife of a priest to occupy herself.
Because these women were devout Jews, the language of the Bible would have been second nature to them. So their words of praise in the Magnificat reflects their knowledge of the Psalms, and also the words of Hannah, who had Samuel in her advanced years. For that reason, the words of the Magnificat apply not only to Mary, but also to Elizabeth. So you can easily imagine the Magnificat taking shape in the home of Elizabeth as two expectant mothers talked about their own experiences and about Biblical role models, and then put these ideas together in their music.
But we still have to ask: How did Luke, 65 years later, get his hands on not only the Magnificat but also such “horse’s mouth” details as the quickening in Elizabeth’s womb and the fact (as he says at the end of Chapter 2) that “(Jesus’) mother kept all these sayings in her heart”? Elizabeth, we’re told, was already “advanced in years”, so she and Zechariah were likely dead by the time when John and Jesus began their ministries at age thirty. Mary would have been in her mid-forties at that time. And If she were still alive when Luke was writing, she would have been at least in her seventies – not impossible, but perhaps unlikely. But if Mary was not alive at this time, then who would know these things and be able to relate them to Luke?
Who better than Mary’s children? Jesus was her firstborn (Luke 2:7), and Joseph “knew her not until she had born [that] son” (Matthew 1:25). But Jesus had at least a half dozen younger siblings: James, Joses, Simon, Jude, and “sisters” (note the plural) as identified in Matthew 13:54. Now, if you know anything about mothers, these siblings would have heard the family stories over and over and over. James, the next oldest, might even have been an eyewitness to Jesus’ being left behind in the Temple. We find this same James as bishop of the church in Jerusalem when Paul, accompanied by Luke, visited there around AD 60 (Acts 21:17; Galatians 1:19). It is entirely possible that Luke found the Jerusalem church using some version of the Magnificat and the Benedictus in their worship services, which may explain why the versions as Luke reports them sound so liturgical.
We still have to ask what the Magnificat means for us, and why we continue to use it in our worship.
First, it ties us back to real historical people and events – without whom, faith in Jesus would be nothing more than a fable, a legend, wishful thinking. Second, the circumstances of those people’s lives remind us that God is down here with us in this sometimes nasty world, sanctifying us and our realities to his glory. Third, there is something really special about being able to offer praise to God in the words of the young woman who bore his Son. Fourth, her words remind us that God keeps his promises of mercy to the humble and meek who fear him. Fifth, those promises tie us back to our Old Testament roots. And finally, Luke would have us understand that the words Elizabeth said to Mary also apply to us: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (1:45).
Luke 1:57-80
This evening we’re going to look at the Benedictus, the second of the three canticles in Luke’s infancy narrative. Last week I neglected to mention the significance of the titles Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc dimittis. So just in case anyone isn’t aware of these, let’s start there.
In the ancient Semitic world, literary works were not identified by titles. They were identified by their first words. We call the first book of the Bible “Genesis”, using the Greek title, but the Jews called it B’reshith, “In the beginning”. We call the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples “The Lord’s Prayer”, but the early Jewish Christians would have called it Avenu, “Our Father”, and the Latin Church followed this practice, calling it Pater noster, So Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc dimittis are simply the first words of these canticles as they appear in the Latin Bible. Magnificat means “It magnifies” that is, “My soul magnifies the LORD”. Benedictus means “Blessed”, as in “Blessed be the LORD God of Israel”. And Nunc dimittis means “Now you are dismissing”, as in “Now you are letting your servant depart in peace”.
Last week I suggested that the Magnificat may have been written jointly by Mary and Elizabeth during the last three months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. In this week’s narrative, John has been born, and we hear the Benedictus while his family and friends are gathered on the eighth day for his circumcision. You remember that Zechariah had been struck dumb because he expressed skepticism about the angel’s promise – that’s “dumb” as in “mute”, of course, not “stupid”. So Zechariah had been communicating with a writing tablet for the past nine months – that’s wax pressed into a wooden frame, and a writing stylus – which is how Elizabeth already knew that the angel had told him to call their son YoHanan – John – “gift of God”.
The circumcision might have been performed at the local synagogue, but the absence of any statement to that effect suggests it more likely took place at home. So let’s try to picture who’s there and what’s happening. The focus of attention is the baby, accompanied by his parents. There’s the mohel (rhymes with “oil”), a religious professional trained to perform circumcisions. It’s the fact that it’s done by an approved mohel that makes it what we would understand as a sacrament, and not just a surgical procedure. Then there’s a male relative who has the honor of holding the baby while it’s being circumcised. There are the godparents, who take the baby from the mother to the mohel. And, of course, there’s an assortment of friends, neighbors, and relatives. The fact that the child is handed off from the mother to the godmother, then to the godfather, who brings him before the mohel and hands him to the man who will hold him during the circumcision, shows that this is not just a private affair, but the child is being received into the covenant community by its appointed representatives.
But wait a minute. Who else attended that circumcision? Whose name is on the guest list that I neglected to mention? That’s right – Mary! Luke tells us (1:56) that Mary remained with Elizabeth for about three months, then returned home. Mary didn’t come all that way just to do household chores; she came to help her cousin through the birth. And after spending three months with Elizabeth, she’s not going to take off a couple of days before the big celebration. Maybe Joseph also came down for the event. Maybe – and here we’re speculating – maybe he and Mary were the godparents, or maybe he got to hold the infant John during the circumcision.
At any rate, the ceremony proceeds, punctuated by prayers and blessings and thanksgivings. After the circumcision, the father is asked to name the child. But of course Zechariah is still mute, so Elizabeth has to answer for him. “John,” she says. “YoHanan” – and everybody thinks, “that’s why we don’t let women do these things – can’t even get her own kid’s name right!” Zechariah motions for a writing tablet and writes, “His name is John.” Instantly Zechariah can speak, and everyone is astonished:
– astonished that Zechariah agrees with his wife about naming the child;
– astonished that they give the child a name that sets him apart from his family;
– astonished that God vindicates this naming by restoring Zechariah’s speech;
and they ask, “What then will this child be?”
This is the point in the ceremony where the father pronounces a blessing on the child, and gives thanks that he has been initiated into the covenant of Abraham. The blessing that Zechariah gives is the canticle that we know as the Benedictus. Luke indicates that when Zechariah pronounced this benediction he was “filled with the Holy Spirit”, that is, speaking under divine inspiration – speaking a prophetic blessing composed under divine inspiration. But being divinely inspired is not the same thing as “winging it”. Zechariah, steeped in the language and history and theology of the Old Testament, had nine months to reflect on this event. And he knew from the angel (1:20) that his inability to speak would last only “until the day these things take place”. So while the women in this Spirit-filled household were composing the Magnificat, Zechariah – writing tablet in hand – was working on the blessing he would pronounce over the son who was soon to be born and circumcised.
Zechariah understands what momentous event is about to take place, for the angel told him that his son would “go before [the LORD] in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” (Luke 1:17) Those are the last words of the last book of the Old Testament, where 400 years earlier Malachi foretold the coming of a new Elijah who would be the forerunner of the Messiah. Zechariah understands that his son will be that new Elijah.
And so he begins:
“Blessed be the LORD God of Israel
for He has visited and made redemption for His people
and raised up a horn of salvation (that is, a mighty salvation) for us
in the house of His servant David.”
But wait a minute! “Visited” – “made redemption” – “raised up a horn of salvation” – that’s not John he’s talking about. Whom is Zechariah looking at as he says this?
At Mary – three months pregnant. Messiah in utero before his eyes.
“Visited” – “made redemption” – “raised up”: That’s Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. Is it any wonder the early Church used this canticle in their liturgy! And even if the Resurrection is a bit of a stretch from what Zechariah could have known at the time, it was no stretch at all for the earliest Christians to read their knowledge of the Resurrection back into the text.
“As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from of old….
to show the mercy promised to our fathers,
and to remember His holy covenant,
the oath that He swore to our father Abraham….”
It was clear to Zechariah that he was witnessing before his eyes the long awaited fulfillment of the prophetic Scriptures, the fulfillment of his people’s covenant, the fulfillment of an oath that God who made it cannot break.
“That we should be saved from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us….
that we…might serve Him without fear,
in holiness and righteousness…all our days.”
Of course, the enemies Zechariah has in mind are the Romans who have over-run the country, and the Greeks who have contaminated their Jewish culture. And these are but the last two in a long series of hostile forces that have dogged the Jews ever since they followed Moses out of Egypt. What I think Zechariah could not foresee was that this hostility would continue, and that not only Jews, but also the Gentile converts who would be called Christians, would be subject to it, and that this hostility would not end until Messiah returns at the end of time.
At verse 76, Zechariah finally turns his attention to John. On a music circuit, John would be called the warm-up act. He goes on first to prepare a people for Messiah’s arrival – a people who have knowledge of salvation, a people who are tuned in to ideas like faith, and repentance, and forgiveness. That’s what John set out to do, and that’s what he achieved.
But when we sing the Benedictus, I think sometimes the verses about John niggle just below the surface of our consciousness with a question something like this: If the main act has come, why are we still singing about the warm-up act at every service of Morning Prayer? Why do we keep repeating Zechariah’s charge to John? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that the Messiah who came will come again, and the charge that Zechariah gave to John now falls to us. This time it’s our job to “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”; it’s our job “to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins.”
But the world we live in – even our so-called “just society” – is still hostile to God and His Messiah and His covenant people. When Zechariah said that John would “guide our feet into the way of peace”, I don’t think he had any idea that a dancing girl would have his son’s head on a platter. The peace that Zechariah hoped for will indeed come, but not until Jesus returns. In the meantime our job is to proclaim sin and salvation to a world that’s becoming increasingly more diverse, increasingly more secular, and increasingly more hostile to the Gospel. One day the dancing girl will be back – with her platter in hand – and when she comes, you and I will be grateful that we had John as a role model, and grateful that we had this canticle to keep us mindful of him.
Luke 2:21-40
This evening we are going to look at the third of the three canticles from Luke’s infancy narrative, the Nunc dimittis, which means “Now you are letting…” – supply the rest of the line – “…your servant depart in peace.” These three canticles originated over a period of about ten months – from Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, to the birth of John three months later, to the purification ceremonies following Jesus’ birth about seven months after that.
When we were looking at the Magnificat and the Benedictus I suggested that, while at first glance they appear to be spontaneous, Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah actually had the time and occasion to compose them deliberately as expressions of praise and blessing. On the other hand, the Nunc dimittis has a brevity that suggests a spontaneous exclamation that got written down some time later. We know that the early Christians used these canticles in worship, because by the fifth century these three appear with a dozen other songs, mostly from the Old Testament, in a collection called the Book of Odes.
In this evening’s reading you see at v.21 that, according to Jewish custom, Jesus was circumcised and given his name on the eighth day. This seems to have happened while they were still at Bethlehem. Then two weeks later they’re traveling 10 km North to Jerusalem (v.22), where this evening’s story takes place. And after that they head back home to Nazareth, 90 km further North (v.39).
So what were they doing in Jerusalem? Luke tells us that they brought Jesus up to Jerusalem “when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses … to present him to the Lord (v.22) … and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons’ ” (v.24).
Notice that Luke speaks of “the time for their purification”: there are two ceremonies going on here, one for Mary, the other for Jesus. As the mother of a newborn, Mary comes to the Temple on the twentieth day, bringing a prescribed animal sacrifice, after which she can resume her participation in the community’s worship. (In modern terms we can compare this to the Anglican service of Thanksgiving After Childbirth, commonly called The Churching of Women.) The prescribed sacrifice in Bible times was a yearling lamb for a burnt offering and a pair of doves or pigeons for a sin offering. Poor folk were allowed to omit the lamb and just bring the pigeons, one for the burnt offering, the other for the sin offering (Leviticus 12). Mary’s offering shows that she and Joseph were poor folk; it also shows that they did not let being poor get in the way of doing their religious duty.
The second ceremony is the presentation of the firstborn male. Luke quotes Exodus 13:2, which says that “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the LORD.” “Called holy to the LORD” means called to serve God in some special way. You see an example of this in the Old Testament when Hannah bears Samuel in her old age, and takes the lad to Eli the priest to be trained for the Temple ministry. So Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple to present him to the LORD for whatever future service God intends.
When they arrived at the Temple, they would have found the usual collection of priests and Levites, fellow-worshippers, vendors and money-changers, Temple police, beggars, tourists, and a handful of Temple groupies. Picture yourself bringing your newborn to church for the first time, and an old man you’ve never seen before comes out of the crowd and says, “May I hold him?” You hesitate, then hand him your child, and he exclaims, “Thank You, God. Now I can die in peace.” Pretty soon this old woman comes up and begins talking to the crowd about your baby. So you can understand how Mary and Joseph might have felt. It’s not as if they didn’t already know that Jesus was special, but still it must have been a disquieting experience.
Luke was scrupulous to include the incident with Anna the prophetess, even though apparently he could get no record of what she said, because, as he understood the gospel from Paul, in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). And that breaking down of distinctions is part of Simeon’s blessing.
When you turn to the actual words of Simeon, you find two clever puns – one in Aramaic, the other in Greek – both double entendres on personal names, which, unfortunately, we cannot reproduce in an English translation. But they’re really there – and to me they look deliberate – which means I think we should take them to be significant.
Jerusalem as an international city was bilingual in much the same way that Montreal is bilingual: Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew, was the local language; and Greek, supplemented by Latin, was the language of commerce and government. Of course, again like Montreal, their official bilingualism was really multilingualism, as we see on the Day of Pentecost, when there were people in Jerusalem speaking every language in the Empire.
But on this day, when Simeon took up the child in his arms, he was praying in Aramaic, or perhaps in Hebrew:
“Now, Lord, you are letting your servant depart in peace,
just as you said you would (2:29),
for my eyes have seen your Yeshua – your salvation” (2:30).
Yeshua is the Hebrew word for “salvation”. “You shall call his name Yeshua,” the angel told Joseph, “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). You can see Mary and Joseph looking puzzled, and thinking, “How did he know the child’s name?” The answer is that God had revealed to Simeon the child’s purpose. God offers us his salvation, his yeshua, in the form of a person – a person called Yeshua. And when he offers his salvation, he is offering us nothing less than himself.
“Now, Lord, you are letting your servant depart in peace,
just as you said you would (2:29),
for my eyes have seen your Yeshua – your salvation – (2:30)
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples (2:31),
a light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel” (2:32).
Simeon looks around the Court of the Gentiles – sees Greeks and Romans and Persians and Africans and Arabs – and understands that this birth is internationally significant: it happened “in the presence of all peoples” because it was happening for all peoples. Simeon rises above ethnic exclusiveness and declares that this single event will be both “the glory of his people Israel” and “a light of revelation to the Gentiles”.
Now that Simeon has concluded his blessing, he slips easily into speaking Greek. (I say that, because the second pun works only in Greek, and if Simeon did not say it, then either Luke is putting words into his mouth, or I’m having a flight of imagination.) Simeon begins by cautioning Mary that her son will bring about “the fall and rising” of many of his countrymen. The Latin Bible translates “fall and rising” as “ruinam et resurrectionem” – “ruin and resurrection”. There is no middle option – Jesus will be our resurrection or he will be our ruin. If we will not have him for the one, we must have him for the other.
Now, that’s not a popular view in our society or in the modern church. It was not a popular view in Simeon’s day either. It’s a view that runs contrary to modern-day pluralism. It’s a view that got early Christians labeled as “haters of humanity”. Simeon anticipates Jesus’ saying that “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
Because Simeon understands the hatred of God that fills many hearts, he recognizes the opposition and the hostility that Jesus will later experience, and the consequent pain that Mary will experience.
“..this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, so that thoughts of many hearts may be revealed – and a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (2:34f).
Simeon has spent a lot of years anticipating the “consolation of Israel” (2:25). That’s a roundabout way of saying the coming of Messiah. Simeon understands something of the hostility that Jesus will experience, because, as an elderly eccentric who holds views and values that go against the current (yes, it takes one to know one), he – and presumably also Anna, the prophetess – have experienced such opposition themselves.
Why do I think that’s what he means? I think it because I see him making a pun on his name that seems to say so. Simeon says that Jesus is going to be “a sign that is opposed”. The Greek word for “sign” is “seemeeon” – from which we get the English word “semiotics”. Our speaker’s name is also “Seemeohn”. The spellings in Greek are different, but in popular Greek speech the pronunciations are almost identical. So Seemeohn, the speaker, says that Jesus is going to be a seemeeon, a sign, that will be opposed.
This is more than just word games. Simeon sees that not only Jesus but all who are waiting for him, and all who would follow him, can expect hostility. It can be the wholesale slaughter of African Christians by Muslim fanatics; or thugs in the United Kingdom destroying the historic Glastonbury yew; it can be as polite and subtle as Waterloo Regional school trustees arguing Charter rights in support of a motion to ban the distribution of Gideon Bibles.
Simeon was right, and he speaks truth to our present age: Jesus is a magnet for opposition, and so are we who believe and follow him, because the gospel lays bare the thoughts of hearts that resist God. The persecution that Simeon spoke of did indeed come in his time and place, and we have no reason to think it will not come in ours. But when or whether it comes, or no, we can say – and sing – with confidence: “Now, Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your Yeshua.”
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)
Sometimes we come across a Scripture passage that does not fit our comfortable assumptions about how things ought to be. Some of us may find Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats a bit like that. You may wonder, for example, why the lectionary would spoil the warm and fuzzy of the week before Christmas with a parable about the Last Judgment.
The answer, I think, is that celebrating Jesus’ birthday is not the same as celebrating any other public figure’s birthday. We continue to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday on the “two-four” weekend, but the grand Empire she presided over has long since had its day and ceased to be. But at Christmas, we’re not just celebrating a grand thing that’s past. We’re celebrating the grandest thing imaginable, that is still to come – because Jesus, whose coming we celebrate, is coming again. Not “again and again and again”, as in some annually recurring myth. But rather, as the angel said at his ascension, “this same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). At Christmas, we celebrate a real time-and-space historical coming that awaits its fulfillment in a second installment. And Jesus says that the second installment will include a Judgment.
But the Judgment theme in this parable is out of sync with the inclusivist views that are widely accepted as politically correct not only in the secular world but even in some major churches. Jesus says that when he returns “he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” He will say to the sheep, “Come you blessed of my father,” and to the goats he will say, “Depart from me.” But the politically correct view is that we’re all sheep, and there are no goats.
Well, if there are no goats, then there’s no need of a Judgment, and no need for the King to say “Depart from me.” In which case, we have no need of a Savior. But then those of us who come to church have to ask: What are we doing here? More importantly, we have to ask: What in the world was Jesus doing here?
He thought that what he was doing here was “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). He thought that he had come “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). He held the politically incorrect view that “if you believe not that I AM, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24). Even the Christmas angels were politically incorrect. Their promise was not the familiar “peace and good will to [all] men” (Luke 2:14). It was “peace to men of good will” (Vulgate) or “peace to men with whom he is well pleased” (English Revised Version, and most others).
Jesus knew we would fall for wishy-washy inclusivist thinking. He even warned us of the error before it occurred. He said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” (Matthew 10:34,39). Of course, this was not what Jesus desired. It was what he knew would happen as soon as people started believing in him.
Yes, Christmas is a family celebration. But Jesus has redefined the notion of “family”. When somebody told Jesus that his mother and his brothers were looking for him, he said, “Who are my mother and my brothers? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, ‘Look, there are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven, that’s my brother, and my sister, and my mother” (Matthew 12:47-50).
So in Jesus’ world-view there really is a distinction between sheep and goats. Goats is the default position, but the good news is that by his grace we may actually choose to be of his sheep and in his family.
Jesus tells us in this parable how he will recognize his sheep and his family. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in….”
“Lord,” ask the astonished sheep, “when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?”
“Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
When Jesus said “these my brothers”, he must have been pointing to persons who were present to his hearers. “These brothers” were the little band of students who accompanied him for three years, his disciples, who would be proclaiming him as the risen Savior, and who would experience hardship and persecution for doing so. Some time earlier Jesus told those disciples much the same thing: “Whoever receives you receives me…. Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward…. And whoever gives one of these little people even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward” (Matthew 10:40,42).
So when Jesus speaks of feeding and clothing and visiting, he is not in this instance promoting a social gospel – though there is ample grounds for that elsewhere. Neither is there anything here about finding Christ in every person. Indeed, the passage assumes that in some people he’s conspicuously absent. What Jesus is saying here is that we’ll be judged on how we have received his gospel, and that a fair measure of how we receive his gospel is how we treat others who believe in Jesus.
So as we prepare our hearts once again to celebrate his birth, let us also consciously celebrate the promise of his coming again. And let us seek to do good to all people, but especially to those that are of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10).
St George’s Church, Hamilton
18 April 2010
Whenever I read a passage like Psalm 2, it takes me back to a New Testament course at the Anglican Theological College in Vancouver. One day in class, a professor said something that didn’t sit quite right, so I put up my hand and raised the question, “What about the Messianic prophecies in the Psalms?” To which the professor replied, “I don’t think there are any Messianic prophecies in the Psalms.”
In Luke 24, during two separate post-resurrection appearances – first on the road to Emmaus, and later with a collection of disciples at Jerusalem – Jesus said, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
So regardless of what the professor thought, Jesus thought that the Old Testament had things to say that applied to him. And that’s the consistent view of all the writers of the New Testament. How could it be otherwise? In Jesus’ day there was no New Testament. The Old Testament was the only Bible that they had that could inform their understanding of what God was doing in the world.
Psalm 2 actually says that it is Messianic. (You can follow this discussion on page 331 of the Psalter in your Book of Common Prayer.) “Why do the nations so furiously rage and why do the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed….”
So how is that Messianic? If you read the last phrase of verse 1 in the original Hebrew, it says “against the LORD and against his Messiah”. The Hebrew word “Messiah” means “Anointed” – whence the translation. Or if you read it in the Septuagint, that pre-Christian Greek translation of the Old Testament, you’ll see that it says, “against the Lord and against his Christ”. The Greek word “Christos” means “Anointed”. So clearly there is a Messianic reference here. But we have to ask: Who is this Messiah, this Christos, this Anointed of the LORD, that the Psalmist is referring to?
Psalm 2 is thought to be an enthronement psalm, a psalm chanted by the priests of the Temple at the coronation of the Hebrew kings, who were God’s anointed. This psalm might even have been written by David for the coronation of his son Solomon. So in the sense of the king as God’s anointed agent, Psalm 2 is Messianic. But if we are going to call it a messianic prophecy, then we have to ask: How is it also prophetic? It is prophetic, I would suggest, by a combination of two things: by the fact that God made a promise, and by the apparent failure of that promise.
We see the promise for the first time at 2 Samuel 7:12ff, where God through the prophet says to David, “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” Psalm 2 expands that promise at verse 8 to include all the nations of the world: “Desire of me and I shall give thee the nations for thy inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.” So in the sense that a promise looks forward, and with the assurance that God keeps his promises, a line like “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” is prophetic.
Except that the promise seems to have failed. The Hebrew kingdom did not continue forever. Wise Solomon at the end of his life behaved most unwisely. He compromised both his faithfulness and his kingdom with too many wives, most of them foreign, and humored them by building temples to their pagan gods. In the centuries that followed, the kingdom was divided, and with few exceptions it was a religious and political failure. The kings didn’t keep the faith. Moses had given rules for a “just society” but they were disregarded. Even some priests and prophets were corrupt. But this failure is in itself also prophetic. It is prophetic because it shows that human leadership is incapable of achieving the “just society”, and human leadership is certainly not capable of achieving the kingdom of God.
Have you ever been in a situation, perhaps at work, where you knew that if you wanted some particular task to be done right – read that as, to be done your way – you were going to have to do it yourself? Well, Isaiah describes just such a situation in Chapter 59: “The LORD saw it” – where “it” refers to the condition of the Hebrew nation – “and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and he was appalled that there was no one to intercede. Then his own arm brought him salvation….” So the failure of the Hebrew kingdom is prophetic in the sense that if God’s promise is going to be fulfilled, it will take a greater than Solomon to achieve it.
Fast forward to the First Century. Mary was a mother, and as a mother she must surely have told her son stories about his birth and about the birth of his cousin John. There stories must surely have raised questions like, Who am I? and What am I supposed to do? Questions to which, throughout his life, Jesus would seek answers in the Scriptures that he came to believe spoke about him. You can see snippets of his wrestling with the Scriptures over such questions during those forty days in the wilderness that followed his baptism – which I think was the climax of a process that gave us those statements in Luke 24 about finding himself portrayed in Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.
The Who? question was resolved at his baptism, when the voice spoke from heaven quoting Psalm 2: “Thou art my son….” The What? and How? questions were resolved in the desert, where the gospels tell us that the devil tempted him by misusing Scripture, and Jesus beat him back by using other Scriptures correctly.
Some time later, on the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, Jesus gets this confirmation once again: “This is my son….”
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews understands this Psalm the same way Jesus did: “To what angel did God ever say, ‘Thou art my Son. Today have I begotten thee.” And a verse later, just to make sure we understand his Christology, he adds: “And again, when he brings his firstborn into the world” – that’s Christmas Day he’s speaking about – “he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.'”
In Acts 4, Peter, in a prayer, quotes Psalm 2 word for word from the Septuagint as a statement about Jesus: “Sovereign Lord, who made heaven and earth, who by the mouth of our Father David, thy servant, didst say by the Holy Spirit, ‘Why did the heathen rage and the peoples imagine vain things? The kings of the earth set themselves in array and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Christ’ – for truly in this city they were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus….'”
In Acts 13, Paul not only quotes Psalm 2, but he even gives us a footnote! Preaching at a synagogue in Asia Minor, he says, “What God promised to our fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus. As also it is written in the second psalm , ‘Thou art my son. Today I have begotten thee.'”
Psalm 2 concludes with a prophetic and Messianic anticipation of the day that St John – and Handel – describe: the day when “the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever.” In fact, there are two words at the beginning of verse 12 that are so conspicuously “New Testament” in flavor that, around 1950, Bible translators and Prayer Book revisers descended into a quarter century of madness during which they left them out. The two words are nashqu bar, “kiss the Son.” A footnote in the RSV says that the Hebrew text here is “uncertain”; in fact, the only peculiarity is that the writer has used an Aramaic word for “son” instead of the Hebrew word. I think the real problem is that the translators could not believe that an Old Testament writer might actually have said such a thing. The kiss referred to is a gesture of reverence or submission, like the old tradition of kneeling before your bishop and kissing his ring. Happily, those words have been restored in the best modern translations, and that’s how I’m going to read them as we conclude. You can follow in your Prayer Book on p.332.
“Be wise, therefore, O ye kings. Be warned, ye that are judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and bow down to him with reverence. Kiss the Son lest he be angry and ye perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.” And for all who do so, this word of assurance: “Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.” Amen.
St George’s Church, Hamilton
16 May 2010
Daniel 7:1,9-10,13-14
Mark 14:55-64
Revelation 1:9-19
There is a well-known saying about the Bible, that the New Testament is contained in Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New. You may have memorized it in these words: “The New Testament is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.” You can see how that is so in our readings of Daniel’s vision in Babylon and John’s vision on Patmos. In Mark 14 Jesus shows us how those passages should be interpreted together.
Daniel was a prophet in Babylon during the years of Exile. He tells us that his visions occurred during the first year of Belshazar’s reign, which dates them at 553 BC. He had, he says, dreams and visions in the night as he lay in his bed, and then he says he wrote what he saw – which is what we have in the book of Daniel. Daniel had visions of four beasts – grotesque symbolic creatures – that signify the four major kingdoms or empires that oppressed God’s covenant people: Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman. The beasts are defeated and brought before divine Judgment, after which God establishes his everlasting kingdom.
Daniel’s description reads like a piece of Divine theatre. Picture the stage at Stratford, complete with property guys, costumes, and special effects, but located but somewhere out in the cosmos. “As I looked, thrones were set in place….” – Can you see the property guys lugging big thrones out to centre stage? – “and the Ancient of Days took his seat…” The royal court is about to be convened. – “His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him….” Costume and special effects combine to convey, however imperfectly, the majesty of God. “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him….” – that’s why you have to move the stage out of Stratford and into the cosmos – “The court sat in judgment [on the four beasts that symbolized the four empires] and the books were opened.”
After the Judgment on the four beasts, Daniel describes Scene Two, in which a hero comes on stage and is presented before the throne. “With the clouds of heaven [picture the special effects] there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.” The expression “son of man” is a poetic Hebrew way of saying “a man”. But, of course, in the circumstances, this man is the promised messianic offspring of David. So what we have here is the description of an investiture. “And to [this Man] was given dominion and glory and a kingdom; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
As Daniel understands it, all the events of history – including everything you see on your daily news channel and everything you read in the daily press – move forward to this one conclusion: the final vindication of God and of his people. No more wandering in the desert no more fighting off the hostile inhabitants of the land no more Exile.
Forward 500 years to Patmos, an island off the coast of Turkey, where the Apostle John is in exile because the government did not approve of his preaching. John says, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day….” The apostle was attending a Sunday worship service. “In the Spirit” suggests that the Holy Spirit had caught him up in an ecstatic trance state in which he saw the unseeable, couched in familiar imagery. He says, “I saw…one like a son of man, clothed in a long robe, with a golden sash across his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like wool, like snow. His eyes were a flame of fire….”
John’s vision borrows imagery from Daniel’s, but not without some differences. “One like a Son of Man” is a reappearance of Daniel’s Messianic figure, but he reappears with a golden sash across his chest. Think back to the royalty you have seen on stage at Stratford – colored sash over the shoulder and joined on the opposite hip – in John’s day a symbol of Imperial power. Daniel’s promise of “dominion and glory and a kingdom” is here fulfilled. This son of man is the long expected King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
But notice this difference: “The hairs of his head were white, like wool, like snow.” The Messiah may be like a son of man, but this picture shows him to be significantly more than a man. “White hair” identifies him with Daniel’s Ancient of Days: “Thrones were placed [says Daniel] and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool.” The Jesus whom John sees is the universal Emperor precisely because he is the King of the Universe – as in the Jewish prayers that begin, “Blessed art thou, O LORD our God, King of the Universe….” It’s no wonder John says, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead”
Now, a Jew reading Daniel 7 will tell you that the Son of Man is a man, who some day in God’s good time will establish peace on earth. But the Son of Man is human, the Ancient of Days is divine, and the two are separate and distinct. That is certainly a possible reading of Daniel 7. So how do we get from that understanding of the Son of Man to John’s understanding, where hair white like snow, eyes of fire, a face shining like the sun, and the Word of God coming from his mouth in the image of a two-edged sword depict Jesus as the Ancient of Days, as Godhead ?
When you read the gospels, you find that Son of Man is the label Jesus preferred. It had less baggage than other things Jesus could have called himself. In first-century Palestine, a messiah could have been seen as a revolutionary. And the prevalence of Greek culture in Jesus’ day made the title “Son of God” open to misunderstanding. But “Son of Man” was a term that Jesus could fill with his own meaning, as indeed he did. We know how Jesus understood the term “Son of Man”, and we know how he interpreted Daniel 7, because in Mark 14, at his trial before Caiaphas, Jesus cites Daniel 7 as a reference to himself: “Now the chief priests and the whole Council were seeking evidence against Jesus to put him to death, but they found none. Many bore false witness against him, but their testimony did not agree. [And Jesus] remained silent…. [Then] the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ – [Are you the Messiah] – the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ Then [Caiaphas] the high priest tore his garments and said, ‘What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your verdict?’ And they all condemned him as deserving death.” (Mark 14:55-64)
“You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power ” – Where did Jesus get that? Jesus knew his Bible, and he knew that Daniel says “thrones were set in place” – thrones, in the plural – one for the Ancient of Days, the other for the Son of Man, who is about to be invested with dominion and glory and kingship. He also knew Psalm 110:1, where God says, “Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool.”In the presence of Majesty, mere mortals stand, bow, kneel, or fall on our faces, but Jesus claims the prerogative of being seated – as we say in the Creed – “at the right hand of the Father”.
Such an outrageous claim by a man on trial for his life necessarily polarizes all who hear it. It compels us to identify either with Caiaphas, who rejected Jesus’ claim as false and offensive – or perhaps delusionary, but still offensive – or with John, who fell at his feet, felt the hand of Jesus on his shoulder, and heard him say “Fear not. I am the first and the last and the living one. I died, but see: I am alive forevermore. And I hold the keys of death – and the grave.” For which we say: Thanks be to God.
1 Samuel 17
In his letter to the Romans (15.4), Paul says that “..whatever things were written aforetime” – he is referring here to the Old Testament – “were written for our instruction, so that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”
It follows from this that the account of David and Goliath should have something to say to us as Christians. But when we read an Old Testament passage as Christians, we should first try to understand what the passage meant to its original Hebrew audience, and that can help us understand how it applies to Christians. If we neglect what the passage meant to its original audience, we risk reading into it supposedly Christian meanings that may not really be there.
As we consider the account of David and Goliath, we should be aware that in the Hebrew Bible the two books that we call First and Second Samuel were originally all one book that should read as a single continuous narrative. When we do that we find that the Book of Samuel is about the establishment of the Hebrew people as a covenant theocracy – a nation that not only acknowledges God, but for whom God actually makes the rules. The high point of the story occurs at 2 Samuel 7, where King David tells Nathan the Prophet that he proposes to make a house for the LORD – a permanent place of worship to replace the tent that they used in the wilderness. So Nathan consults God, and God sends him back to tell David:
10 I will appoint a place for my people Israel and I will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more 11 And I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house: 12 I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
When we turn back 20 years from that point in the narrative to the Goliath story, we see David as a youth, already displaying the heroic qualities that will make him a fit king for God’s covenant people. But in spite of David’s heroic qualities, notice what God emphasizes through the prophet: I will appoint a place for my people I will plant them I will give you rest from your enemies and I the LORD will make you a house. So David is God’s agent, but it is God who plans and God who makes things happen.
Of course, the kingdom in the mind of the writer is an earthly nation-state. But after the days David and Solomon that earthly kingdom experienced more failure than success because its leaders kept neglecting the covenant. Twice in its history the house of God that David wanted to build was destroyed by invading armies – first during the Exile, and second following the Resurrection. But that did not mean that God had failed his promise to establish David’s throne forever. It meant instead that maybe an earthly kingdom was at best only an interim goal maybe we should be looking for a descendant of David who could credibly say, My kingdom is not of this world (John 18.36).
Now, the writer of the Book of Samuel has some very definite ideas about how God builds his kingdom. And if we understand that earthly kingdom as an object lesson that looks forward to God’s everlasting kingdom, then the Book of Samuel has things to teach us about how God wants to build his kingdom even among us at St George’s. I can see at least four insights that the author of Samuel gives us in David’s victory over Goliath – and you may very well find more.
First: God builds his kingdom by means of providence. I once asked Dr A. W. Tozer – a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in Toronto back in the 1960s – how he understood the notion of providence. “Providence,” said Dr Tozer, “is God playing his checkers.” God knows every piece that’s on the board, and every possible move and God uses that knowledge so that the game plays out the way he wants it.
Long before David became king, God in his providence was positioning him to gain the knowledge and the visibility and the credibility that he would need for the job. David “just happened” to be available to play music that would soothe King Saul when his fits of schizophrenia came on him. And that exposure gave David first-hand knowledge of what went on in the king’s court. David “just happened” to be bringing a CARE package to his brothers on the battlefield when Goliath proposed his challenge of single combat. And Saul “just happened” to offer his daughter Michal as the prize for the hero who could beat Goliath, thereby locking in David’s claim to the throne.
In that respect, nothing has changed. As God works among us, we find ourselves in situations that invite us to do things for his kingdom. They may be as simple as an opportunity to show hospitality or to do some kindness – perhaps just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Of course, we can dismiss such things as coincidences, but I remember a chap who used to say, “Yes, they may be coincidences but when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.” So pray that God will make us sensitive to the coincidences that he sends us, so that we will use them for the building of his kingdom.
Second: David was insignificant, but he was God’s choice for the job. He was the youngest of eight brothers, a mere kid who looked after sheep while his three eldest brothers served in the army. They didn’t mind that he brought them CARE packages from their father, but as soon as David showed interest in the Goliath problem, they accused him of slacking and told him to get back to the sheep where he belonged. They were afraid of Goliath like everyone else, but they were not going to be upstaged by their kid brother.
It is not an accident that David had this underling role. God delights in using those whom the world counts as insignificant. 26 For consider your calling, brethren, says Paul to the Corinthians, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are – why? – 29 so that no flesh should glory in his presence. (1 Corinthians 1)
Third: David’s success did not depend on numbers nor on the latest human methods, but on God’s sufficiency. When David’s friend Jonathan and his armor bearer attacked a Philistine garrison single-handedly, Jonathan said: Nothing can hinder the LORD from saving by many or by few (1 Samuel 14.6). Even by the standards of 1063 BC David’s weaponry was primitive. How could he compete against Goliath with a mere slingshot? When he turned down the use of Saul’s armor, he explained tactfully that he wasn’t skilled in using it. What he really meant was that he believed that God had already given him the tools he needed for the task that God had called him to do.
“You come to me,” David said to Goliath, “with a sword and a spear and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, whom you have defied.” And David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone. There was no sword in the hand of David (1 Samuel 17:46,50).
Whatever God may call us to do – even here at St George’s – is possible within the skills and resources and numbers that God has given us – or, in his providence, will give us. This is true for us corporately as a congregation, and individually in the ministries that he intends for each and every one of us.
Fourth, and most importantly: God did not send David out to do a job in his own strength and wisdom. The writer tells us that as soon as Samuel had anointed David to be Saul’s successor, the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward (1 Samuel 16.13). This was not a one-off occurrence; it is part of the divine modus operandi; it is how God works. In the same way, when Saul was anointed 30 years earlier, Samuel told him that he would meet a group of prophets and then the Spirit of the LORD will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man (1 Samuel 10.6). The writer also tells us that after Saul disobeyed God’s word through the prophet, and God rejected him from being king, the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16.14). Four hundred years later, when the Jews returned from Babylon to rebuild the Temple and the nation, Zechariah gave them the same word: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:1).
These are some of the keys to building God’s kingdom, whether 3000 years and half a world away, or here in Hamilton. As we seek to be and to build God’s church where we live, may we pray for, and may he grant us, the working of his providence, the discernment to know his will, confidence in his sufficiency, and the empowering of his Spirit – for Jesus’ sake, who said, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16.18).