Rock-solid change
Commentary
As the end of the old year draws near, and as the dawn of a new year begins to break, we think about change. You wake up one morning, and you get out of bed and look in the mirror. Doesn't there seem to be a little more gray? And perhaps that wrinkle over there is new?
You think back to last summer, to your weekly tennis game, and you remember noticing that things didn't move in quite the same way. There's not quite as much mobility in that arm. And not quite as much oomph in your serve.
And then let's say you go to church, and you sit in your usual pew, but then you discover that something is different about the worship bulletin, and they have these new hymns that you don't know, which, if the truth be told, you're not quite sure are appropriate in church.
And then you think back to Christmas Day and you remember how different things were from previous years. Your children have their own families and wanted to spend Christmas with them.
It's everybody, all ages. Consider employment. As of 1998, the median tenure for workers 25 years and older was 4.7 years: they work one place for that long, on average, and then move on. What that means is that Gen-Xers today will probably have ten different jobs in their lifetimes. Consider moving. People pick up and move at the drop of a hat, from Los Angeles to San Diego, from Maine to Arizona. Where are our roots? Where is our stability?
Change is upon us. The most traditional time of the year leads us straight into the change of the year, along with resolutions and pledges about how things will change for the better in the new year. In these "holy-days" when tradition means so much to us, when we do things simply because they are traditional, we are acutely aware of how much things change.
Traditional though it may be, the line from "Deck The Halls," "Fast away the old year passes, hail the new, ye lads and lasses," doesn't bring much comfort. The old is passing away too fast, so it's hard to hail the new. Change is engulfing us.
New things are indeed upon us, including the incredible new thing that God has done at Christmas, but in the midst of all the change -- disruptive, frightening, often agonizing -- we need to remember that the purpose of God is steadfast and remains the same: more than anything else God's plan is to save people.
Isaiah 63:7-9
As we see in the First Lesson Focus for this week, the Isaiah reading is a small portion of a larger literary unit (63:7--64:12) from Third Isaiah. The larger unit is termed a psalm, and it falls into the category of psalms known as laments, which asks God for deliverance from enemies or help for the nation in times of distress. It is, then, an intercessory prayer in its original form.
In truncating the original psalm, the lectionary has created a psalm of praise. God has been gracious in his dealings with Israel, showing mercy and steadfast love, calling them "my people" and saving them in their distress, by God's own presence, not by a messenger or angel, and going so far as to carry "them all the days of old" (v. 9).
There are three points that emerge from the reading.
First, God's salvation of Israel was not done because of something about Israel, some particular virtue or merit, even though the poet has God saying that the people "will not deal falsely," something that we know in retrospect was not true. No, it wasn't Israel's goodness that secured God's salvation. It was because God is gracious (v. 7); God has shown mercy and steadfast love (v. 7); and God has loved and pitied Israel (v. 9). We so want to make God's favor depend on our behavior, but the distinction goes back to Israel, and before, that we are not saved because of who we are, but because of who God is. It was God's love that did this, not Israel's merit or deservedness.
Second, in verse 9 we hear that God's salvation was not by some agent or intercessor, neither a messenger nor an angel. On the contrary, it was God's own being, God's presence, that saved Israel. And in the same way we affirm that the One whose birth we have just celebrated is not a mere vehicle for God's action, but is ... God. What we hear described is an enormously intimate relationship between Creator and creature, between Yahweh and Israel. God is not distant, sending a stand-in to do the business of saving. Israel always needed to be reminded of that. We're no different: we never really believe how close God is to us, closer, as Saint Augustine pointed out, than we are to ourselves.
Third, is it legitimate -- historically, literarily, religiously -- for the lectionary to simply pull a small portion of scripture out of context and apply it to something vastly different from what was originally intended, to make a point that may have no relationship to the original point of the text? When that happens in argumentative situations, we call it "proof-texting" and we frown on it. Nevertheless, by selecting this one piece of the psalm of lament, we affirm that God's overall purpose in relating to humanity remains constant and solid throughout, regardless of the details and regardless of the historical setting. So what is God's purpose? In dealing with human beings, it is salvation. God wants to save people, God wants to draw people closer, always closer. And that applies to Israel, and to the church of Jesus Christ, and to the entire world.
On this Sunday after Christmas, this reading sings of God's initiative in dealing with us, the intimacy of God's dealing with us, and God's overarching purpose of salvation in dealing with us, all of which is surely the fundamental message of Christmas and the incarnation. After all, the word to Joseph was, "... you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21).
Hebrews 2:10-18
The most persistent, varied, fought-over question in 2,000 years of Christianity so far, and probably in eons of Christianity yet to come, is: Who is Jesus Christ? The most difficult and most argued answer to the question is: He is God incarnate. The Hebrew reading addresses incarnation, and specifically the reason for the incarnation, which is salvation.
By way of background, we might remember that the Letter to the Hebrews is anonymous and that it was written, as its name suggests, to Jewish Christians. It would almost be better to designate it a theological treatise, for there is a carefully reasoned argument that runs through the book. As with Matthew's Gospel, one of its prime concerns is to show the continuity of Jesus Christ with the religion of the Old Testament, but also to show that Christ's sacrifice was superior to the sacrifices of Judaism. And one piece of Christ's superiority, a key theme that we find in the lectionary reading, is that of Christ as high priest.
It begins with a reference to God's plan of salvation, speaking of "bringing many children to glory" and "their salvation." God is accomplishing this through the pioneer, Jesus Christ, the "one who sanctifies." It is fitting that Christ be the one, for since we have the same Father, Christ is our brother. And this does two things: 1) it fulfills the scriptures, quoted in verses 12 (Psalm 22:22) and 13 (Isaiah 8:17-18); and 2) it sets the stage for the next logical assertion in verses 14-16. The fact that Christ was the same flesh and blood as other human beings, meant that he was able to destroy death, freeing Abraham's descendants -- not angels or other beings -- from slavery to death.
Verse 17 moves into a formulation of the classical, orthodox theory of the atonement -- that Christ died as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of human beings, an explanation or understanding of Christ that has come increasingly into question in recent years. It is in the realm of sacrifice that Christ -- who is both priest and victim -- is compared to the sacrifices under the Old Testament law.
Hebrews then -- and specifically this passage -- has constructed a careful demonstration, one premise building on the next, of how God saves through Christ. And lest we think that the Sunday after Christmas is too soon to speak of Christ's atoning death, preferring instead to wait until Good Friday, we need to bear in mind that the incarnation -- i.e., Christmas -- is only the first step in God's total purpose of salvation.
Matthew 2:13-23
Matthew's chief concern in his Gospel, written for Jewish Christians, is to show that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament and that the church is the New Israel. More specifically, he wants to convey the message that Jesus Christ is the Messiah who had been spoken of in the prophets. Nowhere is that more evident than in this reading.
The passage follows directly on the story of the Wise Men, who had revealed the existence of the child to Herod. Structurally, there are three segments to the reading, each of which ends with a quotation from the Old Testament, a prophecy of which Jesus is the fulfillment.
Verses 13-15 speak of the message Joseph received in a dream and the ensuing flight to Egypt to protect the child. Parenthetically, Matthew has the most references to Joseph of all four Gospels, which is entirely in keeping with Matthew's purpose, since Joseph is the one who connects Jesus with David. The flight to Egypt is a clear parallel with Israel's sojourn in Egypt. And Matthew exploits the parallel by quoting from Hosea 11:1, and pointing out that in Jesus was the fulfillment of that prophecy.
In verses 16-18, the scene changes to Herod's palace. In his fury, Herod orders all children two and under to be killed, in what has come to be known as "the slaughter of the innocents." Again, there is a clear parallel with Israel in the story of Pharaoh and the killing of the male children of the Hebrews. And again Matthew makes the connection with the Old Testament explicit, by the quotation from Jeremiah (31:15). It is very interesting to note that the Common Lectionary of 1983 left verses 16-18 out of the reading for this day. The current Revised Common Lectionary of 1992 put them back in. It was appropriate to restore them, since it reinforces Matthew's point of Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecies.
The third segment of the reading, verses 19-23, returns to Joseph and his family in Egypt, with the angelic message to return to Israel, since Herod had died. But the threat was not over, since Herod's son was ruling in Judea. The family bypasses Judea, heads for Galilee, and settles in the town of Nazareth. In Luke, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth before the birth. Matthew's version of the story suggests that they lived in Bethlehem, so this passage serves to get Jesus to Nazareth, in keeping with the Hebrew Scriptures. The particular citation, however, is obscure, and commentators offer various suggestions for the meaning of the word rendered "Nazorean" in the NRSV: it could mean Nazarene, that is, a person from Nazareth; it could be related to the word for "branch," as in Isaiah 11:1; or it could be a corruption of the word "Nazarite," as in Judges 13:7. The main point to be made here, however, is that Matthew sees it and reports it as yet another case of Jesus' fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah.
The simple truth in this is that God's purpose remains the same, from the time of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to the time of the prophets, to the time of Caesar Augustus and the Roman era in Palestine, and to this moment. And not even murderous rulers like Herod can thwart God's purpose and intention.
Application
One day when I was in eighth grade, a geography teacher asked the class this question: What is the one thing that doesn't change? We tried various answers. The universe doesn't change, we said. But we immediately knew that wasn't the case, even back then we knew that the universe was expanding. We tried the other end of the size scale. Atoms don't change, we said. But Einstein and the atomic bomb had disproved that. We tried a lot of answers in between, to each of which he shook his head. When we finally gave up and asked him the answer, he said, very dramatically and impressively, "Change." It's not a new observation; it is an old saw: The only thing that doesn't change is ... change. Change is the one constant, the one rule of the universe. And it is a rule of human beings, human life, and human culture.
But human beings have a love-hate relationship with change. Sometimes we love the excitement of the new, and there are some of us that are always seeking whatever is new, never content with the same old thing. We look forward to the change of a year, perhaps to the change of a job, seeing it as a blank slate, a fresh start. Yet change can disrupt. It can throw us into confusion and disarray. The stabilities of life serve to keep us on course.
Even those of us who find a home in Christianity find change accelerating. There are new styles, new beliefs, new practices, new faces in church on Sunday morning. Discussions of touchy hot topics like the ordination of gays and lesbians, abortion and the death penalty have become routine. Where once the church was stable and reliable, now it moves and changes as much as anything else in the world. So when the axe of change severs the roots that we have in the world, cutting our sense of connectedness, where do we turn?
Each of the three lectionary passages deals in some way with the issue of continuity in the face of change, specifically, the continuity of God's desire to save people.
In Isaiah we hear a psalm of praise to God, sung in a post-exilic setting, about salvation. And why should Israel praise God? Even though she has passed through the fire of conquest, and even though her people have been dispersed, God's purpose for the people is constant. However much Israel's circumstances have changed -- and they have changed dramatically -- and however much Israel's understanding of God has changed, what hasn't changed is the fact that God always wants to save people. And that is a cause for hope and joy.
Hebrews offers the same message, this time to Jewish Christians of the early church, and this time in highly theological language and in the language of sacrifice. Christ is savior, and the incarnation was God's fitting and right way to save the children of Abraham, in keeping with the law of God. Underlying it all is the deep conviction that the coming of the Christ is simply one more part of God's salvation, a continuation of all that was articulated in the Law and the Prophets.
Matthew too, goes to great pains to assure his readers that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, a fact that became apparent, as Matthew describes it, even when Jesus was still an infant. What his parents did, where he went, where he lived, all were in keeping with the prophecies of the Davidic Messiah. God's purpose survives, despite all efforts -- including Herod's murders -- to block it.
We continue in the season of Christmastide, celebrating, rejoicing, thanking God, for the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is the incarnation of God in a human being new? Yes, unquestionably, completely new, utterly unheard of. But in another sense, a larger sense, it is the same, old, unfailing thing. It is God's constant, immutable love for humanity taking shape in history, always drawing people closer, closer, closer to God.
Alternative Application
Isaiah and Hebrews: An Intimate God: Isaiah takes great care to point out that the salvation of God is from God himself. There is no intermediary, no agent through which God works. In the Hebrews passage we read that Christ shares all the humanness that we have, he is one of us. It paints a picture of a God who is not distant, not far away and isolated. In the annals of gods that human beings have worshiped that is new. Greek gods lived high on Mount Olympus and Norse gods lived in Valhalla, separate and apart from people. But our God is close, nearby, knowing us intimately.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Isaiah 63:7-9
It is interesting to contrast the original setting of this passage with the setting in which the lectionary now places it. In Third Isaiah (chs. 56-66), these three verses form the first strophe or stanza of the long poem found in Isaiah 63:7 through 64:12. And that poem has the traditional structure of a lament by a community in trouble. It begins with a recounting of the Lord's saving deeds in the past (63:7-14), details the community's present desperate situation (63:15-19), and ends with petitions for the Lord's help and rescue (64:1-12). The entire poem comes from an embattled group of Levites and reformers in the post-exilic community, who have been shunned and persecuted by the Aaronite priests and their followers. And it forms a remarkable dialogue with God -- a recounting of his saving deeds in the exodus, wilderness wandering, and entrance into the promised land (63:11-14), an acknowledgment of the group's own sinfulness and deserved punishment (64:5-7), a reflection of God's righteous judgment in the destruction of Jerusalem and in the exile (64:9-11), and yet, an enduring faith in God's steadfast covenant and fatherly relation with his people Israel (63:7-9, 16; 64:8).
By designating 63:7-9 as the stated Old Testament reading for the first Sunday after Christmas, however, the lectionary has lifted these verses out of their original context and made them apply to the gift of God's Son to us at Christmastime. Now they are intended to reflect our Christian joy at the birth of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. It is not an inappropriate use of this text, for 63:7-9 can be considered to form a praise Psalm in themselves, and surely if anything should call forth our praise, it is Christ's birth at Bethlehem. Let us therefore examine the structure of the passage with Christmas in mind.
Prominent in this text is the characterization of our relation with God as a covenant relation. In verse 7, we have a twofold mention of the Lord's "steadfast love" toward us. The Hebrew word used is chesed and that word refers to God's enduring covenant promise always to be our God, with us as his people. God has made a covenant with us, a pact, a promise to maintain his relationship with us always, and he will not go back on that promise. Our Lord sealed that covenant relationship with us at the last supper with his disciples when he took the cup and pronounced, "This is the new covenant in my blood," and you and I are inheritors of that covenant every time we celebrate the Lord's Supper. We now are God's people, belonging to him, and he will not give us up (cf. Romans 8:38-39). He has shown us his "steadfast love," a love begun for us in Christ's birth and sealed with his death on the cross for our sakes.
But what now is our relation with God in Christ? What is our relation since Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Our text says that we are now God's sons and daughters (v. 8). We often have the mistaken notion that the God of the Old Testament is a fearsome, wrathful Judge, and that we do not hear of a loving God until the New Testament. But nothing could be further from the truth. In our passage and throughout the Old Testament, Israel is considered to be God's adopted son (cf. Exodus 4:22-23; Deuteronomy 8:5; Isaiah 1:2; Hosea 11:1; Jeremiah 31:20), and God is Israel's Father (cf. Isaiah 45:11; Jeremiah 3:19; 31:9; Malachi 1:6; 2:10). God loves Israel with the tender love of a Father (cf. Hosea 11:3), and you and I now share in the gift of that fatherly love because of Christ. In our baptisms, we too were adopted by God as his children (John 1:12; Galatians 4:4-7). We too are now given the privilege of calling him Father (Matthew 6:9; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). And the love that God bears for us is the love of our heavenly Father for his children, far beyond any human love, never failing and always steadfast.
Out of his love for us, says our text, God has shown us incredible deeds of mercy. Three prominent acts of God toward us are mentioned. First, he has shared in all of our afflictions. And that is what happened when God became man in the birth of Jesus Christ, isn't it, the fact reflected in our epistle lesson for the morning (Hebrews 2:14-18)? God saw all of our troubles, our pains, our sufferings, our deaths (cf. Exodus 3:7), and so in the birth of his Son he incarnated himself to share all of those conditions. He took upon himself our flesh and participated fully in our humanity. Jesus Christ is truly divine and truly human -- God in our condition, God sharing our life.
Second, God knew that we could not rescue ourselves from our afflictions, however, and so in our Lord Christ he "redeemed" us, just as he redeemed Israel out of slavery in Egypt. To be redeemed, according to the scriptures, is to be "bought back" out of slavery by a family member (cf. Leviticus 25:47-49). And in Jesus Christ, God did that for us. He bought us back out of our slavery to sin and to the evil of the world and to death. He freed us from their grip, giving the life of Jesus, to deliver us into freedom. Christ was our ransom price. Christ was what God paid for us. Christ became our redemption (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30).
Then, third, proclaims our text, God in Christ lifted us up and carried us all our days (cf. Isaiah 46:3-4). And indeed, he has, hasn't he? When our own strength has been insufficient to see us through some pain or loss, Christ-with-us has carried us. When we have found our way uncertain and the future unclear, Immanuel our Lord has guided us. When we have faced temptation and the allures of evil ways, the teachings and presence of our God in Christ has strengthened us and pointed us in the right direction. And yes, even when everything has seemed to go right and our hearts have been full of joy, we have been able to voice our happiness by giving our thanks to our God in his Son.
So our text sums it all up in one word. It says God became our "Savior." And that, indeed, is what he became and now is in that One born in Bethlehem. The angels who announced Christ's birth to the shepherds were right in their glad news. Unto us was born a Savior who is Christ the Lord. Surely, as we reflect on the gift that has been given to us, as we celebrate still in this Christmas season of the church, we can echo the words of our text. We can recount the wondrous, steadfast love of the Lord.
THE POLITICAL PULPIT
Matthew 2:13-23
A sermon about the plight of American children is appropriate today. The Gospel reading refers expressly to a society bent on the destruction of children. Christmas itself proclaims God's love and affirmation of childhood, evident in the divine decision to become Incarnate as a Child. This is a self-emptying agape love that does not love for the sake of the "goodies" it can get out of the kids. Such love always aims to promote what is best for their long-term future interests.
God's Christmas love tears out our self-indulgent practices. Proclaiming this love allows us to critique our self-indulgent treatment of children. As such, God's Christmas love provides us with a vision for the kind of love we may begin to shower on our own children.
This love is willing to sacrifice immediate gratification if need be in order to give our children family security by honoring our marriage vows. This is also a love that will make sacrifices in order to spend some real "quantity" time with them. It is a love that offers a social vision that can drive us into the public sphere to seek legislation to provide for other people's kids. For the sake of our eschatological reality (the future), my prayer is that God's love will compel you to join me in such prophetic preaching and advocacy.
Of course reliance on the love of God leads to one more insight about the future of our children. I learned that Word at my grandmother's knee. No matter how hard you try, she would say, you will mess up your kids in some way. So if they turn out all right, it really is a (divine) miracle! Such love did not lead her to laissez-faire parenting styles. It can set you free from your egocentricity, free to revel in, live, and advocate for the gift of love. Will you preach it, and live it with me?
You think back to last summer, to your weekly tennis game, and you remember noticing that things didn't move in quite the same way. There's not quite as much mobility in that arm. And not quite as much oomph in your serve.
And then let's say you go to church, and you sit in your usual pew, but then you discover that something is different about the worship bulletin, and they have these new hymns that you don't know, which, if the truth be told, you're not quite sure are appropriate in church.
And then you think back to Christmas Day and you remember how different things were from previous years. Your children have their own families and wanted to spend Christmas with them.
It's everybody, all ages. Consider employment. As of 1998, the median tenure for workers 25 years and older was 4.7 years: they work one place for that long, on average, and then move on. What that means is that Gen-Xers today will probably have ten different jobs in their lifetimes. Consider moving. People pick up and move at the drop of a hat, from Los Angeles to San Diego, from Maine to Arizona. Where are our roots? Where is our stability?
Change is upon us. The most traditional time of the year leads us straight into the change of the year, along with resolutions and pledges about how things will change for the better in the new year. In these "holy-days" when tradition means so much to us, when we do things simply because they are traditional, we are acutely aware of how much things change.
Traditional though it may be, the line from "Deck The Halls," "Fast away the old year passes, hail the new, ye lads and lasses," doesn't bring much comfort. The old is passing away too fast, so it's hard to hail the new. Change is engulfing us.
New things are indeed upon us, including the incredible new thing that God has done at Christmas, but in the midst of all the change -- disruptive, frightening, often agonizing -- we need to remember that the purpose of God is steadfast and remains the same: more than anything else God's plan is to save people.
Isaiah 63:7-9
As we see in the First Lesson Focus for this week, the Isaiah reading is a small portion of a larger literary unit (63:7--64:12) from Third Isaiah. The larger unit is termed a psalm, and it falls into the category of psalms known as laments, which asks God for deliverance from enemies or help for the nation in times of distress. It is, then, an intercessory prayer in its original form.
In truncating the original psalm, the lectionary has created a psalm of praise. God has been gracious in his dealings with Israel, showing mercy and steadfast love, calling them "my people" and saving them in their distress, by God's own presence, not by a messenger or angel, and going so far as to carry "them all the days of old" (v. 9).
There are three points that emerge from the reading.
First, God's salvation of Israel was not done because of something about Israel, some particular virtue or merit, even though the poet has God saying that the people "will not deal falsely," something that we know in retrospect was not true. No, it wasn't Israel's goodness that secured God's salvation. It was because God is gracious (v. 7); God has shown mercy and steadfast love (v. 7); and God has loved and pitied Israel (v. 9). We so want to make God's favor depend on our behavior, but the distinction goes back to Israel, and before, that we are not saved because of who we are, but because of who God is. It was God's love that did this, not Israel's merit or deservedness.
Second, in verse 9 we hear that God's salvation was not by some agent or intercessor, neither a messenger nor an angel. On the contrary, it was God's own being, God's presence, that saved Israel. And in the same way we affirm that the One whose birth we have just celebrated is not a mere vehicle for God's action, but is ... God. What we hear described is an enormously intimate relationship between Creator and creature, between Yahweh and Israel. God is not distant, sending a stand-in to do the business of saving. Israel always needed to be reminded of that. We're no different: we never really believe how close God is to us, closer, as Saint Augustine pointed out, than we are to ourselves.
Third, is it legitimate -- historically, literarily, religiously -- for the lectionary to simply pull a small portion of scripture out of context and apply it to something vastly different from what was originally intended, to make a point that may have no relationship to the original point of the text? When that happens in argumentative situations, we call it "proof-texting" and we frown on it. Nevertheless, by selecting this one piece of the psalm of lament, we affirm that God's overall purpose in relating to humanity remains constant and solid throughout, regardless of the details and regardless of the historical setting. So what is God's purpose? In dealing with human beings, it is salvation. God wants to save people, God wants to draw people closer, always closer. And that applies to Israel, and to the church of Jesus Christ, and to the entire world.
On this Sunday after Christmas, this reading sings of God's initiative in dealing with us, the intimacy of God's dealing with us, and God's overarching purpose of salvation in dealing with us, all of which is surely the fundamental message of Christmas and the incarnation. After all, the word to Joseph was, "... you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21).
Hebrews 2:10-18
The most persistent, varied, fought-over question in 2,000 years of Christianity so far, and probably in eons of Christianity yet to come, is: Who is Jesus Christ? The most difficult and most argued answer to the question is: He is God incarnate. The Hebrew reading addresses incarnation, and specifically the reason for the incarnation, which is salvation.
By way of background, we might remember that the Letter to the Hebrews is anonymous and that it was written, as its name suggests, to Jewish Christians. It would almost be better to designate it a theological treatise, for there is a carefully reasoned argument that runs through the book. As with Matthew's Gospel, one of its prime concerns is to show the continuity of Jesus Christ with the religion of the Old Testament, but also to show that Christ's sacrifice was superior to the sacrifices of Judaism. And one piece of Christ's superiority, a key theme that we find in the lectionary reading, is that of Christ as high priest.
It begins with a reference to God's plan of salvation, speaking of "bringing many children to glory" and "their salvation." God is accomplishing this through the pioneer, Jesus Christ, the "one who sanctifies." It is fitting that Christ be the one, for since we have the same Father, Christ is our brother. And this does two things: 1) it fulfills the scriptures, quoted in verses 12 (Psalm 22:22) and 13 (Isaiah 8:17-18); and 2) it sets the stage for the next logical assertion in verses 14-16. The fact that Christ was the same flesh and blood as other human beings, meant that he was able to destroy death, freeing Abraham's descendants -- not angels or other beings -- from slavery to death.
Verse 17 moves into a formulation of the classical, orthodox theory of the atonement -- that Christ died as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of human beings, an explanation or understanding of Christ that has come increasingly into question in recent years. It is in the realm of sacrifice that Christ -- who is both priest and victim -- is compared to the sacrifices under the Old Testament law.
Hebrews then -- and specifically this passage -- has constructed a careful demonstration, one premise building on the next, of how God saves through Christ. And lest we think that the Sunday after Christmas is too soon to speak of Christ's atoning death, preferring instead to wait until Good Friday, we need to bear in mind that the incarnation -- i.e., Christmas -- is only the first step in God's total purpose of salvation.
Matthew 2:13-23
Matthew's chief concern in his Gospel, written for Jewish Christians, is to show that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament and that the church is the New Israel. More specifically, he wants to convey the message that Jesus Christ is the Messiah who had been spoken of in the prophets. Nowhere is that more evident than in this reading.
The passage follows directly on the story of the Wise Men, who had revealed the existence of the child to Herod. Structurally, there are three segments to the reading, each of which ends with a quotation from the Old Testament, a prophecy of which Jesus is the fulfillment.
Verses 13-15 speak of the message Joseph received in a dream and the ensuing flight to Egypt to protect the child. Parenthetically, Matthew has the most references to Joseph of all four Gospels, which is entirely in keeping with Matthew's purpose, since Joseph is the one who connects Jesus with David. The flight to Egypt is a clear parallel with Israel's sojourn in Egypt. And Matthew exploits the parallel by quoting from Hosea 11:1, and pointing out that in Jesus was the fulfillment of that prophecy.
In verses 16-18, the scene changes to Herod's palace. In his fury, Herod orders all children two and under to be killed, in what has come to be known as "the slaughter of the innocents." Again, there is a clear parallel with Israel in the story of Pharaoh and the killing of the male children of the Hebrews. And again Matthew makes the connection with the Old Testament explicit, by the quotation from Jeremiah (31:15). It is very interesting to note that the Common Lectionary of 1983 left verses 16-18 out of the reading for this day. The current Revised Common Lectionary of 1992 put them back in. It was appropriate to restore them, since it reinforces Matthew's point of Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecies.
The third segment of the reading, verses 19-23, returns to Joseph and his family in Egypt, with the angelic message to return to Israel, since Herod had died. But the threat was not over, since Herod's son was ruling in Judea. The family bypasses Judea, heads for Galilee, and settles in the town of Nazareth. In Luke, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth before the birth. Matthew's version of the story suggests that they lived in Bethlehem, so this passage serves to get Jesus to Nazareth, in keeping with the Hebrew Scriptures. The particular citation, however, is obscure, and commentators offer various suggestions for the meaning of the word rendered "Nazorean" in the NRSV: it could mean Nazarene, that is, a person from Nazareth; it could be related to the word for "branch," as in Isaiah 11:1; or it could be a corruption of the word "Nazarite," as in Judges 13:7. The main point to be made here, however, is that Matthew sees it and reports it as yet another case of Jesus' fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah.
The simple truth in this is that God's purpose remains the same, from the time of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to the time of the prophets, to the time of Caesar Augustus and the Roman era in Palestine, and to this moment. And not even murderous rulers like Herod can thwart God's purpose and intention.
Application
One day when I was in eighth grade, a geography teacher asked the class this question: What is the one thing that doesn't change? We tried various answers. The universe doesn't change, we said. But we immediately knew that wasn't the case, even back then we knew that the universe was expanding. We tried the other end of the size scale. Atoms don't change, we said. But Einstein and the atomic bomb had disproved that. We tried a lot of answers in between, to each of which he shook his head. When we finally gave up and asked him the answer, he said, very dramatically and impressively, "Change." It's not a new observation; it is an old saw: The only thing that doesn't change is ... change. Change is the one constant, the one rule of the universe. And it is a rule of human beings, human life, and human culture.
But human beings have a love-hate relationship with change. Sometimes we love the excitement of the new, and there are some of us that are always seeking whatever is new, never content with the same old thing. We look forward to the change of a year, perhaps to the change of a job, seeing it as a blank slate, a fresh start. Yet change can disrupt. It can throw us into confusion and disarray. The stabilities of life serve to keep us on course.
Even those of us who find a home in Christianity find change accelerating. There are new styles, new beliefs, new practices, new faces in church on Sunday morning. Discussions of touchy hot topics like the ordination of gays and lesbians, abortion and the death penalty have become routine. Where once the church was stable and reliable, now it moves and changes as much as anything else in the world. So when the axe of change severs the roots that we have in the world, cutting our sense of connectedness, where do we turn?
Each of the three lectionary passages deals in some way with the issue of continuity in the face of change, specifically, the continuity of God's desire to save people.
In Isaiah we hear a psalm of praise to God, sung in a post-exilic setting, about salvation. And why should Israel praise God? Even though she has passed through the fire of conquest, and even though her people have been dispersed, God's purpose for the people is constant. However much Israel's circumstances have changed -- and they have changed dramatically -- and however much Israel's understanding of God has changed, what hasn't changed is the fact that God always wants to save people. And that is a cause for hope and joy.
Hebrews offers the same message, this time to Jewish Christians of the early church, and this time in highly theological language and in the language of sacrifice. Christ is savior, and the incarnation was God's fitting and right way to save the children of Abraham, in keeping with the law of God. Underlying it all is the deep conviction that the coming of the Christ is simply one more part of God's salvation, a continuation of all that was articulated in the Law and the Prophets.
Matthew too, goes to great pains to assure his readers that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, a fact that became apparent, as Matthew describes it, even when Jesus was still an infant. What his parents did, where he went, where he lived, all were in keeping with the prophecies of the Davidic Messiah. God's purpose survives, despite all efforts -- including Herod's murders -- to block it.
We continue in the season of Christmastide, celebrating, rejoicing, thanking God, for the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is the incarnation of God in a human being new? Yes, unquestionably, completely new, utterly unheard of. But in another sense, a larger sense, it is the same, old, unfailing thing. It is God's constant, immutable love for humanity taking shape in history, always drawing people closer, closer, closer to God.
Alternative Application
Isaiah and Hebrews: An Intimate God: Isaiah takes great care to point out that the salvation of God is from God himself. There is no intermediary, no agent through which God works. In the Hebrews passage we read that Christ shares all the humanness that we have, he is one of us. It paints a picture of a God who is not distant, not far away and isolated. In the annals of gods that human beings have worshiped that is new. Greek gods lived high on Mount Olympus and Norse gods lived in Valhalla, separate and apart from people. But our God is close, nearby, knowing us intimately.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Isaiah 63:7-9
It is interesting to contrast the original setting of this passage with the setting in which the lectionary now places it. In Third Isaiah (chs. 56-66), these three verses form the first strophe or stanza of the long poem found in Isaiah 63:7 through 64:12. And that poem has the traditional structure of a lament by a community in trouble. It begins with a recounting of the Lord's saving deeds in the past (63:7-14), details the community's present desperate situation (63:15-19), and ends with petitions for the Lord's help and rescue (64:1-12). The entire poem comes from an embattled group of Levites and reformers in the post-exilic community, who have been shunned and persecuted by the Aaronite priests and their followers. And it forms a remarkable dialogue with God -- a recounting of his saving deeds in the exodus, wilderness wandering, and entrance into the promised land (63:11-14), an acknowledgment of the group's own sinfulness and deserved punishment (64:5-7), a reflection of God's righteous judgment in the destruction of Jerusalem and in the exile (64:9-11), and yet, an enduring faith in God's steadfast covenant and fatherly relation with his people Israel (63:7-9, 16; 64:8).
By designating 63:7-9 as the stated Old Testament reading for the first Sunday after Christmas, however, the lectionary has lifted these verses out of their original context and made them apply to the gift of God's Son to us at Christmastime. Now they are intended to reflect our Christian joy at the birth of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. It is not an inappropriate use of this text, for 63:7-9 can be considered to form a praise Psalm in themselves, and surely if anything should call forth our praise, it is Christ's birth at Bethlehem. Let us therefore examine the structure of the passage with Christmas in mind.
Prominent in this text is the characterization of our relation with God as a covenant relation. In verse 7, we have a twofold mention of the Lord's "steadfast love" toward us. The Hebrew word used is chesed and that word refers to God's enduring covenant promise always to be our God, with us as his people. God has made a covenant with us, a pact, a promise to maintain his relationship with us always, and he will not go back on that promise. Our Lord sealed that covenant relationship with us at the last supper with his disciples when he took the cup and pronounced, "This is the new covenant in my blood," and you and I are inheritors of that covenant every time we celebrate the Lord's Supper. We now are God's people, belonging to him, and he will not give us up (cf. Romans 8:38-39). He has shown us his "steadfast love," a love begun for us in Christ's birth and sealed with his death on the cross for our sakes.
But what now is our relation with God in Christ? What is our relation since Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Our text says that we are now God's sons and daughters (v. 8). We often have the mistaken notion that the God of the Old Testament is a fearsome, wrathful Judge, and that we do not hear of a loving God until the New Testament. But nothing could be further from the truth. In our passage and throughout the Old Testament, Israel is considered to be God's adopted son (cf. Exodus 4:22-23; Deuteronomy 8:5; Isaiah 1:2; Hosea 11:1; Jeremiah 31:20), and God is Israel's Father (cf. Isaiah 45:11; Jeremiah 3:19; 31:9; Malachi 1:6; 2:10). God loves Israel with the tender love of a Father (cf. Hosea 11:3), and you and I now share in the gift of that fatherly love because of Christ. In our baptisms, we too were adopted by God as his children (John 1:12; Galatians 4:4-7). We too are now given the privilege of calling him Father (Matthew 6:9; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). And the love that God bears for us is the love of our heavenly Father for his children, far beyond any human love, never failing and always steadfast.
Out of his love for us, says our text, God has shown us incredible deeds of mercy. Three prominent acts of God toward us are mentioned. First, he has shared in all of our afflictions. And that is what happened when God became man in the birth of Jesus Christ, isn't it, the fact reflected in our epistle lesson for the morning (Hebrews 2:14-18)? God saw all of our troubles, our pains, our sufferings, our deaths (cf. Exodus 3:7), and so in the birth of his Son he incarnated himself to share all of those conditions. He took upon himself our flesh and participated fully in our humanity. Jesus Christ is truly divine and truly human -- God in our condition, God sharing our life.
Second, God knew that we could not rescue ourselves from our afflictions, however, and so in our Lord Christ he "redeemed" us, just as he redeemed Israel out of slavery in Egypt. To be redeemed, according to the scriptures, is to be "bought back" out of slavery by a family member (cf. Leviticus 25:47-49). And in Jesus Christ, God did that for us. He bought us back out of our slavery to sin and to the evil of the world and to death. He freed us from their grip, giving the life of Jesus, to deliver us into freedom. Christ was our ransom price. Christ was what God paid for us. Christ became our redemption (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30).
Then, third, proclaims our text, God in Christ lifted us up and carried us all our days (cf. Isaiah 46:3-4). And indeed, he has, hasn't he? When our own strength has been insufficient to see us through some pain or loss, Christ-with-us has carried us. When we have found our way uncertain and the future unclear, Immanuel our Lord has guided us. When we have faced temptation and the allures of evil ways, the teachings and presence of our God in Christ has strengthened us and pointed us in the right direction. And yes, even when everything has seemed to go right and our hearts have been full of joy, we have been able to voice our happiness by giving our thanks to our God in his Son.
So our text sums it all up in one word. It says God became our "Savior." And that, indeed, is what he became and now is in that One born in Bethlehem. The angels who announced Christ's birth to the shepherds were right in their glad news. Unto us was born a Savior who is Christ the Lord. Surely, as we reflect on the gift that has been given to us, as we celebrate still in this Christmas season of the church, we can echo the words of our text. We can recount the wondrous, steadfast love of the Lord.
THE POLITICAL PULPIT
Matthew 2:13-23
A sermon about the plight of American children is appropriate today. The Gospel reading refers expressly to a society bent on the destruction of children. Christmas itself proclaims God's love and affirmation of childhood, evident in the divine decision to become Incarnate as a Child. This is a self-emptying agape love that does not love for the sake of the "goodies" it can get out of the kids. Such love always aims to promote what is best for their long-term future interests.
God's Christmas love tears out our self-indulgent practices. Proclaiming this love allows us to critique our self-indulgent treatment of children. As such, God's Christmas love provides us with a vision for the kind of love we may begin to shower on our own children.
This love is willing to sacrifice immediate gratification if need be in order to give our children family security by honoring our marriage vows. This is also a love that will make sacrifices in order to spend some real "quantity" time with them. It is a love that offers a social vision that can drive us into the public sphere to seek legislation to provide for other people's kids. For the sake of our eschatological reality (the future), my prayer is that God's love will compel you to join me in such prophetic preaching and advocacy.
Of course reliance on the love of God leads to one more insight about the future of our children. I learned that Word at my grandmother's knee. No matter how hard you try, she would say, you will mess up your kids in some way. So if they turn out all right, it really is a (divine) miracle! Such love did not lead her to laissez-faire parenting styles. It can set you free from your egocentricity, free to revel in, live, and advocate for the gift of love. Will you preach it, and live it with me?
