What a Vision!
Commentary
Merry Christmas! The midwinter festival has come, and it calls for parties, feasting and drinking and dancing and the exchange of gifts. Like all people in the northern hemisphere, we need light in the dark days of winter. The only problem with all of this is that the pressure to be joyful can send us spiraling in the exact opposite of mind sets.
The people of the first century C.E. had a huge festival, the Saturnalia, which likewise featured feasting and drinking, laughter and dancing, the giving and receiving of gifts. In and around Jerusalem, where most of the Roman garrison was posted, their celebration grated on the Jews, whose power had been taken away by this foreign army. Watching them celebrate their ‘pagan’ religious holy day in such a way was the height of offensiveness. Especially because their young adults were being ‘infected’ by the Roman view of the world, a natural outgrowth of the Hellenistic influences that had taken root generations before.
Into the midst of these conflicts God announces that Messiah (Hebrew title; Christ in Greek) has been born. The Jews of Jerusalem would be disappointed; they expected that Messiah would be born in the palace, from a leading family in the lineage of the ancient King David. The Jews of Galilee (a very cosmopolitan area, where many religions and cultures mixed) would likewise be disappointed, as they expected Messiah to appear miraculously, coming out of the heavens riding a white horse and accompanied by a garrison of angels. He pleases no one. He has an abbreviated pedigree (at best). He very nearly was a bastard; in fact, one of the early forms of derision by the Jewish populace against Jesus was that he was born out of wedlock.
And yet — still — God chooses to come among us as human. A boy baby, born in a poor family, attended by the scruff of humanity, the unclean, the unwanted, the outcasts. What a vision!
Isaiah 9:2-7
“The people who walked in darkness.” Who might that be?
We don’t take this statement literally; the prophets wrote poetry most of the time, so the words can be metaphorical or idioms of the time. Rather, we need to think on the business of living in the dark rather in light. The language suggests dark alleys, where someone can be waiting with a club or knife, ready to beat us into submission or die so they can clean out our purse or pocket and leave us to be found in the morning, when sunlight might reveal our plight. Or it might be suggesting that we live among people of little or no faith. A land of deep darkness might mean that we live in a place like Somalia, where they are trying to survive in a land where they have had no rain for three years.
Or it might be that, as in Israel at the time this was written, the king is dishonest, the law perverted to favor the rich and to let the poor die in the streets. But the reference “on the day of Midian” tells us that the author is thinking specifically of a time when others besieged the Jews. The Midianites were traditional enemies of Israel, and the two countries were often at war. The Midianites outnumbered the Israelites, and the “Day of Midian” refers to a particular, early battle between the two nations. God told Gideon how to drive them away using a clever ruse, by which they convinced the army of Midian that they were far more numerous than they were.
That story would have given comfort to the Jews of Isaiah’s time, when the Assyrians were a real threat to the people of Israel. The time in which the Day of Midian occurred would likewise be a sign of hope to the Jews of Jesus’ day, when their nation was ruled over by Gentiles (those who did not follow the Jewish faith). It might be like telling school children about the early battles of our own Revolutionary war, to promote patriotism and admiration of our own founding fathers.
So the prophet is trying to direct his audience toward hope. Hope that God will protect them from the ravages of war. Hope that they will soon have nothing in this world to fear. That they will not be taken into captivity, that they will not be defeated in war, with all the horror those ancient wars inflicted on those who win and those who lose, but most especially those who would see horrors perpetrated on the women and children (horrors that we still see in war-torn countries).
That hope centers on an infant boy:
A child has been born for us,
A son given to us;
Authority rests upon his shoulders;
And he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Every year at this time, we ponder the future: will we have peace, or war? Can we make treaties that will protect the future for our children and the children of our enemies? Can we learn to have respect for others who do not look like us, who do not believe the same things we do, or who have very different ideas of how to help those who are not clever or educated to have a good life. Or even to have a life at all. We ponder our relationships with other nations: will we continue to think of certain nations as our enemies, those with whom we have been competing for generations, or can we at last overcome those barriers that keep us from giving up that old animosity? We think on these things partly because the passing of one year into another reminds us that we will not live forever.
And like those ancient peoples, we have placed our hope in a child, who will take authority and rule us as a Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace, with enough authority to lead us into better days. The Jews took this to mean that God would anoint someone to be their Christ (Greek for Chosen One), Messiah (Hebrew for Anointed One), and that that man could and would establish peace rather than war, love rather than disrespect, order rather than chaos and worship that would honor God’s authority rather than a despot’s authority. God may have the power to condemn us for our selfish pride, but Jesus came to introduce us to a God who is love, who will help us to express our deepest good toward one another.
Titus 2:11-14
The beauty of this reading lies in two things: What the coming of God in the form of Jesus does not only to save us, but to transform us. We are all walking bundles of contradictions: kind and loving to those we know, but full of prejudices and uncertainties; generous to those we know need our help and yet jealous of what others can afford; joyous children of God who nevertheless are full of hatred and contempt for those who think different thoughts than ours.
Paul refers to a single word that can bridge those oppositions in our personalities: grace.
I remember my mentor as I came into the ministry telling me that when he went before the panel of pastors who would approve or disapprove his entry into the pathway that would lead to being ordained, one of the pastors said to him, “Imagine that you are standing by the door as people leave after worship, shaking hands and greeting your parishioners, and a boy of about ten comes out and asks, ‘Pastor, what is grace?’ What would you say to him, considering his age and the fact that grownups are coming behind him, ready to get in their cars and leave?” My mentor said, “I still worry with that question. Here is one of the most profound concepts of our faith in God. What would you say?”
In this passage from Titus, Paul says that God shows his glory in ‘our Savior, Jesus Christ.’ In other words, Jesus is the embodiment of God’s grace. But what does that mean? “Jesus… gave himself for us that he might redeem us and purify us so that we might be zealous for good deeds.”
This is why many pastors like to say that “God has no grandchildren.” Only those who have been touched by God directly can be zealous for good deeds. We may want to be good people; we may hope that God loves us. We may wish to earn our way into heaven. But to be zealous for good deeds requires that we be in love with God. It requires that we long for God’s love, as well. It’s not someone trying to “buy a ticket to heaven” as one old gospel song puts it; rather, it is wanting to do as much for God as we possibly can “because he first loved us.”
We don’t develop this love, this passion to be with God, by sitting in church. We don’t receive God’s favor because we make a point of designing the best Christmas service we can. We are given that favor before we even know we need it. We have already received God’s love. We are already one of God’s favorite people. Whatever we do for God, for the world, for our Savior is in response to that outreach that God has already made toward us. We are like one who finds out that no matter what we may give back, our fiancé loved us first and will always love us more than we love that person.
Years ago, I was teaching an Advent Bible class, and I said that God instilled Godself into this newborn baby, making himself as helpless as babies always are, dependent on their parents to give them all the love and assistance that we need, protecting them as well as possible against all the evils of the world. One of the young mothers in that group burst out, “But why would God do that — make himself so vulnerable? That’s a terrible risk, isn’t it?”
I found myself a little taken aback, a little troubled about what to say. But my response was, “Well, yes, it was a terrible risk, as you say. But how else could God break through our fear? We had to meet him in this infant stage so that we would reach out toward God and not be afraid.”
She shook her head, saying, “I don’t know. I don’t think I ever understood what trust God had in Mary and Joseph, to become totally helpless in their care.”
Have we understood what God was willing to risk so that we might not be afraid of him?
If you have a child who is afraid of, say, dogs, the best way to help him overcome his fear is to buy him a puppy. If s/he grows up with the puppy as it grows and matures, the child will have no reason to fear the dog. S/he will remember the wiggly puppy even when the dog is old and lame, and the love that s/he has for the puppy will overcome whatever fear she might have had of dogs. So, too, God comes to us as a helpless infant so that we will remember that demonstration of God’s trust in us early on, and not fear God as we grow and realize that not everyone knows how much they are loved by God.
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
This version of the birth of Jesus is probably the most popular of the Gospel accounts. At least, it must be since it’s the version Linus recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas. There’s no violence here, no Gentile magicians coming to find the ‘newborn king of the Jews,’ thus setting off a chain of events that results in King Herod’s soldiers slaughtering every male baby under the age of two in Bethlehem. No midnight awakening of Joseph, being told by an angel to flee to Egypt and stay there until he’s told it is safe to return to Nazareth.
Luke’s vision of the event is focused on the lowliest of people in the Judeo-Roman world, those for whom the Lord and Savior has come. These shepherds were living outdoors, guarding someone else’s sheep through the night to prevent wild animals from killing and eating the sheep. They were under suspicion all the time, because they weren’t paid well, and the sheep belonged to some rich farmer who could afford to hire them. They had the same problems faced by migrant workers today — there was no way to take a bath while they were out in the fields, so they smelled of sweat and the animals they were caring for. Their inferior status made them vulnerable to accusations of theft and untrustworthiness: any losses from the flock could be the shepherds eating one of the lambs, not wild dogs or other predators. They were out in all kinds of weather, needing to find a cave to shelter themselves and the sheep they were responsible for. And most important, their work kept them from being able to go down to Jerusalem to attend sacrifices in the Temple. Even if they could get days off to make the trip, there was the problem of needing a ritual bath before they could enter the Temple grounds, and that cost money they did not have. Even worse, many of the shepherds of that day were Gentiles — not part of the community of faith, so certainly not worthy of an angelic announcement of this magnitude!
Yet in Luke’s story of the birth of Christ, they are the first people to hear of the birth of the Messiah. From God’s special messengers, no less! Thus, Jesus’ ministry to the lowest of the low, the outcasts and the Gentiles is also announced.
This is no small thing. The birth of God’s Messiah should have been announced to the religious authorities, or even the king, not some shepherds out in some grazing area. Mary and Joseph ought to have been in the home of some relatives, not in their lower room where the animals were bedded down for the night. Luke’s version makes the family unclean (no place for God’s chosen one to be born). His first visitors are ritually unclean most of the time, mistrusted by most of the people of his day. All of this is to set the scene for Jesus’ ministry, a ministry that makes us all one people — outcasts, Gentiles, zealots and thieves. And women, who were not just handmaids to the Lord, but were as much disciples as the men who followed Jesus.
Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus began with the stories of the angel Gabriel inviting Mary to be the mother of the Messiah and Zechariah to be the father of John the Baptist, who was to announce the coming of Messiah, fulfilling the Old Testament expectations for the coming of Messiah. This story foreshadows Jesus’ clashes with those in high places, as he is called ‘Lord’ and ‘Savior,’ titles that were also applied to Caesar Augustus. He is, in his birth, a danger to those who intended to keep their exalted positions and power. Enough of a danger that he will eventually die in the manner reserved for traitors and highwaymen.
Even so, the song the ‘multitude of the heavenly host (army)’ includes “on earth peace, goodwill among people.”1
“Why would God make himself so vulnerable?” Yes, a newborn infant is the very epitome of vulnerability. His only defense is that he can cry and scream for help. But this baby is dangerous even at his birth. ‘Lord’ means ‘you have power over me.’ If I bow down to a baby, that baby must be exceptional. Only the children of the most highly placed people would be given such power. ‘Savior’ means I am counting on you to defend me and to heal me in every way — emotionally, physically and mentally. In Luke’s gospel, both of these qualities are surely seen in the adult Jesus. Luke has given us fair warning: this baby has come to change everything.
1 Some translators say “among those whom he favors!” But Luke doesn’t deal in God’s favorites. The usual phrase used in many Christmas hymns is “goodwill to men” but in today’s vernacular that would seem to exclude women, and Luke doesn’t limit the lives and responsibilities of the women in the story. Therefore, I have gone with the alternate reading in the footnote of 2:14 in the NRSV.
The people of the first century C.E. had a huge festival, the Saturnalia, which likewise featured feasting and drinking, laughter and dancing, the giving and receiving of gifts. In and around Jerusalem, where most of the Roman garrison was posted, their celebration grated on the Jews, whose power had been taken away by this foreign army. Watching them celebrate their ‘pagan’ religious holy day in such a way was the height of offensiveness. Especially because their young adults were being ‘infected’ by the Roman view of the world, a natural outgrowth of the Hellenistic influences that had taken root generations before.
Into the midst of these conflicts God announces that Messiah (Hebrew title; Christ in Greek) has been born. The Jews of Jerusalem would be disappointed; they expected that Messiah would be born in the palace, from a leading family in the lineage of the ancient King David. The Jews of Galilee (a very cosmopolitan area, where many religions and cultures mixed) would likewise be disappointed, as they expected Messiah to appear miraculously, coming out of the heavens riding a white horse and accompanied by a garrison of angels. He pleases no one. He has an abbreviated pedigree (at best). He very nearly was a bastard; in fact, one of the early forms of derision by the Jewish populace against Jesus was that he was born out of wedlock.
And yet — still — God chooses to come among us as human. A boy baby, born in a poor family, attended by the scruff of humanity, the unclean, the unwanted, the outcasts. What a vision!
Isaiah 9:2-7
“The people who walked in darkness.” Who might that be?
We don’t take this statement literally; the prophets wrote poetry most of the time, so the words can be metaphorical or idioms of the time. Rather, we need to think on the business of living in the dark rather in light. The language suggests dark alleys, where someone can be waiting with a club or knife, ready to beat us into submission or die so they can clean out our purse or pocket and leave us to be found in the morning, when sunlight might reveal our plight. Or it might be suggesting that we live among people of little or no faith. A land of deep darkness might mean that we live in a place like Somalia, where they are trying to survive in a land where they have had no rain for three years.
Or it might be that, as in Israel at the time this was written, the king is dishonest, the law perverted to favor the rich and to let the poor die in the streets. But the reference “on the day of Midian” tells us that the author is thinking specifically of a time when others besieged the Jews. The Midianites were traditional enemies of Israel, and the two countries were often at war. The Midianites outnumbered the Israelites, and the “Day of Midian” refers to a particular, early battle between the two nations. God told Gideon how to drive them away using a clever ruse, by which they convinced the army of Midian that they were far more numerous than they were.
That story would have given comfort to the Jews of Isaiah’s time, when the Assyrians were a real threat to the people of Israel. The time in which the Day of Midian occurred would likewise be a sign of hope to the Jews of Jesus’ day, when their nation was ruled over by Gentiles (those who did not follow the Jewish faith). It might be like telling school children about the early battles of our own Revolutionary war, to promote patriotism and admiration of our own founding fathers.
So the prophet is trying to direct his audience toward hope. Hope that God will protect them from the ravages of war. Hope that they will soon have nothing in this world to fear. That they will not be taken into captivity, that they will not be defeated in war, with all the horror those ancient wars inflicted on those who win and those who lose, but most especially those who would see horrors perpetrated on the women and children (horrors that we still see in war-torn countries).
That hope centers on an infant boy:
A child has been born for us,
A son given to us;
Authority rests upon his shoulders;
And he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Every year at this time, we ponder the future: will we have peace, or war? Can we make treaties that will protect the future for our children and the children of our enemies? Can we learn to have respect for others who do not look like us, who do not believe the same things we do, or who have very different ideas of how to help those who are not clever or educated to have a good life. Or even to have a life at all. We ponder our relationships with other nations: will we continue to think of certain nations as our enemies, those with whom we have been competing for generations, or can we at last overcome those barriers that keep us from giving up that old animosity? We think on these things partly because the passing of one year into another reminds us that we will not live forever.
And like those ancient peoples, we have placed our hope in a child, who will take authority and rule us as a Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace, with enough authority to lead us into better days. The Jews took this to mean that God would anoint someone to be their Christ (Greek for Chosen One), Messiah (Hebrew for Anointed One), and that that man could and would establish peace rather than war, love rather than disrespect, order rather than chaos and worship that would honor God’s authority rather than a despot’s authority. God may have the power to condemn us for our selfish pride, but Jesus came to introduce us to a God who is love, who will help us to express our deepest good toward one another.
Titus 2:11-14
The beauty of this reading lies in two things: What the coming of God in the form of Jesus does not only to save us, but to transform us. We are all walking bundles of contradictions: kind and loving to those we know, but full of prejudices and uncertainties; generous to those we know need our help and yet jealous of what others can afford; joyous children of God who nevertheless are full of hatred and contempt for those who think different thoughts than ours.
Paul refers to a single word that can bridge those oppositions in our personalities: grace.
I remember my mentor as I came into the ministry telling me that when he went before the panel of pastors who would approve or disapprove his entry into the pathway that would lead to being ordained, one of the pastors said to him, “Imagine that you are standing by the door as people leave after worship, shaking hands and greeting your parishioners, and a boy of about ten comes out and asks, ‘Pastor, what is grace?’ What would you say to him, considering his age and the fact that grownups are coming behind him, ready to get in their cars and leave?” My mentor said, “I still worry with that question. Here is one of the most profound concepts of our faith in God. What would you say?”
In this passage from Titus, Paul says that God shows his glory in ‘our Savior, Jesus Christ.’ In other words, Jesus is the embodiment of God’s grace. But what does that mean? “Jesus… gave himself for us that he might redeem us and purify us so that we might be zealous for good deeds.”
This is why many pastors like to say that “God has no grandchildren.” Only those who have been touched by God directly can be zealous for good deeds. We may want to be good people; we may hope that God loves us. We may wish to earn our way into heaven. But to be zealous for good deeds requires that we be in love with God. It requires that we long for God’s love, as well. It’s not someone trying to “buy a ticket to heaven” as one old gospel song puts it; rather, it is wanting to do as much for God as we possibly can “because he first loved us.”
We don’t develop this love, this passion to be with God, by sitting in church. We don’t receive God’s favor because we make a point of designing the best Christmas service we can. We are given that favor before we even know we need it. We have already received God’s love. We are already one of God’s favorite people. Whatever we do for God, for the world, for our Savior is in response to that outreach that God has already made toward us. We are like one who finds out that no matter what we may give back, our fiancé loved us first and will always love us more than we love that person.
Years ago, I was teaching an Advent Bible class, and I said that God instilled Godself into this newborn baby, making himself as helpless as babies always are, dependent on their parents to give them all the love and assistance that we need, protecting them as well as possible against all the evils of the world. One of the young mothers in that group burst out, “But why would God do that — make himself so vulnerable? That’s a terrible risk, isn’t it?”
I found myself a little taken aback, a little troubled about what to say. But my response was, “Well, yes, it was a terrible risk, as you say. But how else could God break through our fear? We had to meet him in this infant stage so that we would reach out toward God and not be afraid.”
She shook her head, saying, “I don’t know. I don’t think I ever understood what trust God had in Mary and Joseph, to become totally helpless in their care.”
Have we understood what God was willing to risk so that we might not be afraid of him?
If you have a child who is afraid of, say, dogs, the best way to help him overcome his fear is to buy him a puppy. If s/he grows up with the puppy as it grows and matures, the child will have no reason to fear the dog. S/he will remember the wiggly puppy even when the dog is old and lame, and the love that s/he has for the puppy will overcome whatever fear she might have had of dogs. So, too, God comes to us as a helpless infant so that we will remember that demonstration of God’s trust in us early on, and not fear God as we grow and realize that not everyone knows how much they are loved by God.
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
This version of the birth of Jesus is probably the most popular of the Gospel accounts. At least, it must be since it’s the version Linus recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas. There’s no violence here, no Gentile magicians coming to find the ‘newborn king of the Jews,’ thus setting off a chain of events that results in King Herod’s soldiers slaughtering every male baby under the age of two in Bethlehem. No midnight awakening of Joseph, being told by an angel to flee to Egypt and stay there until he’s told it is safe to return to Nazareth.
Luke’s vision of the event is focused on the lowliest of people in the Judeo-Roman world, those for whom the Lord and Savior has come. These shepherds were living outdoors, guarding someone else’s sheep through the night to prevent wild animals from killing and eating the sheep. They were under suspicion all the time, because they weren’t paid well, and the sheep belonged to some rich farmer who could afford to hire them. They had the same problems faced by migrant workers today — there was no way to take a bath while they were out in the fields, so they smelled of sweat and the animals they were caring for. Their inferior status made them vulnerable to accusations of theft and untrustworthiness: any losses from the flock could be the shepherds eating one of the lambs, not wild dogs or other predators. They were out in all kinds of weather, needing to find a cave to shelter themselves and the sheep they were responsible for. And most important, their work kept them from being able to go down to Jerusalem to attend sacrifices in the Temple. Even if they could get days off to make the trip, there was the problem of needing a ritual bath before they could enter the Temple grounds, and that cost money they did not have. Even worse, many of the shepherds of that day were Gentiles — not part of the community of faith, so certainly not worthy of an angelic announcement of this magnitude!
Yet in Luke’s story of the birth of Christ, they are the first people to hear of the birth of the Messiah. From God’s special messengers, no less! Thus, Jesus’ ministry to the lowest of the low, the outcasts and the Gentiles is also announced.
This is no small thing. The birth of God’s Messiah should have been announced to the religious authorities, or even the king, not some shepherds out in some grazing area. Mary and Joseph ought to have been in the home of some relatives, not in their lower room where the animals were bedded down for the night. Luke’s version makes the family unclean (no place for God’s chosen one to be born). His first visitors are ritually unclean most of the time, mistrusted by most of the people of his day. All of this is to set the scene for Jesus’ ministry, a ministry that makes us all one people — outcasts, Gentiles, zealots and thieves. And women, who were not just handmaids to the Lord, but were as much disciples as the men who followed Jesus.
Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus began with the stories of the angel Gabriel inviting Mary to be the mother of the Messiah and Zechariah to be the father of John the Baptist, who was to announce the coming of Messiah, fulfilling the Old Testament expectations for the coming of Messiah. This story foreshadows Jesus’ clashes with those in high places, as he is called ‘Lord’ and ‘Savior,’ titles that were also applied to Caesar Augustus. He is, in his birth, a danger to those who intended to keep their exalted positions and power. Enough of a danger that he will eventually die in the manner reserved for traitors and highwaymen.
Even so, the song the ‘multitude of the heavenly host (army)’ includes “on earth peace, goodwill among people.”1
“Why would God make himself so vulnerable?” Yes, a newborn infant is the very epitome of vulnerability. His only defense is that he can cry and scream for help. But this baby is dangerous even at his birth. ‘Lord’ means ‘you have power over me.’ If I bow down to a baby, that baby must be exceptional. Only the children of the most highly placed people would be given such power. ‘Savior’ means I am counting on you to defend me and to heal me in every way — emotionally, physically and mentally. In Luke’s gospel, both of these qualities are surely seen in the adult Jesus. Luke has given us fair warning: this baby has come to change everything.
1 Some translators say “among those whom he favors!” But Luke doesn’t deal in God’s favorites. The usual phrase used in many Christmas hymns is “goodwill to men” but in today’s vernacular that would seem to exclude women, and Luke doesn’t limit the lives and responsibilities of the women in the story. Therefore, I have gone with the alternate reading in the footnote of 2:14 in the NRSV.
