Love for the Advent Season
On Sunday, December 10, the sol cafe had Christmas carols and crafts, as well as this week's verses according to the Revised Common Lectionary, for celebrating the second Sunday of Advent. The theme was tentatively "love" but nothing is ever written in stone at the sol cafe! (And since I, the webguy, missed church this week, hopefully someone will post some comments on how the gathering went!)...
The verses for this week were:
Baruch 5:1-9
Luke 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6
P.S. Yes, we know the Book of Baruch is not generally considered part of the protestant Bible, but that's a topic for another Sunday!
The verses for this week were:
Baruch 5:1-9
Luke 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6
P.S. Yes, we know the Book of Baruch is not generally considered part of the protestant Bible, but that's a topic for another Sunday!
5 comment(s):
Many of these Advent readings focus on the expectation of a Messiah. The Old Testament passages, especially, have a political leader in mind. Why is it important to consider the Jewish expectations of the Messiah at Christmas? Because it is precisely those expectations that the earliest Christians re-interpreted in order to understand the Christ event. Ultimately, it was those hopes that they (and we) believed Christ gave new meaning to.
Most, if not all, of the OT passages that we read as prophecies foretelling the birth of Christ were considered fulfilled long before Jesus' birth. There was no checklist of unfulfilled prophecies concerning the Messiah that one might have turned to. The Messiah was largely a mythic conception, so that anyone who brought freedom to the people of God was considered a Messiah. It was in this light that King David was called a Son of God. Because of this, many of the passages that refer to a Messiah had long been fulfilled by someone who had actually brought concrete deliverance. These prophecies were in that sense already fulfilled, although they were still living, because they always applied as long as Israel needed a Saviour. Therefore, if we want to understand how Christ's life affected people – if we want to hear the gospel writers “in their own language,” so to speak, we need to be able to relate to their hopes and expectations concerning this Messiah, the Son of God.
When we understand the hope that was placed in the Messiah – the intense longing for this Deliverer, and the comfort derived from God's promises – we may grasp what a radical move the NT writers made when they attributed those qualities to Jesus of Nazareth. Essentially, they were saying, “this Jesus, whom you saw, touched and ate with – whom you grew up with, lived with, and saw die – this one is the Promised one from God. And he did bring you the freedom you long for. He did bring the peace of God to Earth. But not in the way you expected.” It is in this light that we must read the OT prophets.
However, embedded in this way of reading is an assumption. We cannot empathize with these pre-Christian hopes, unless we ourselves have hopes. Listen to this imagery: “God will shew thy brightness unto every country under heaven... they departed from thee on foot, and were led away of their enemies: but God bringeth them unto thee exalted with glory, as children of the kingdom... God hath appointed that every high hill, and banks of long continuance, should be cast down, and valleys filled up, to make even the ground, that Israel may go safely in the glory of God. Moreover even the woods and every sweetsmelling tree shall overshadow Israel by the commandment of God.” And finally, one of the most beautiful promises of all, “God shall lead Israel with joy in the light of his glory with the mercy and righteousness that cometh from him.” Imagine what this meant to a nation occupied by perceived “heathens,” a nation whose Aunts and Uncles, Brothers and Sisters, Sons and Daughters, had been taken captive, forcefully relocated, and were spread throughout the empire. Then imagine what it meant to apply this to the man they knew, Jesus.
Is it just our natural tendancy as humans to want a political messiah? I look at Canada and the demands we put on our leaders, they go beyond what is administrative. I see religous groups pressuring a moral code onto the leaders as well. Is there a paralell to what the Isrealites were expecting in a messiah and what we seem to be trumpeting that Jesus is today.
The next question would be, What kind of messiah is Jesus? How do we understand what that means? I know there is scripture that speaks to this, but how do we absorb and understand this? Who is Christ? What is he here to be and what is he demanding of me? At Christmas we celebrate the coming of our Messiah, our saviour. What is Christ, not what we want him to be, but what is he telling us he is?
I think that there are 2 comparable tendencies in human nature: the tendency to turn politics into a religion, and the tendency to turn religion into politics. We see examples of the first when we expect our politicians to be moral leaders, when we expect super-human qualities from them, and when (at times) humans have overtly worshiped them. This, I believe, is idolatry, for only God can fulfill those needs. They are real needs, however, and I think this partly accounts for what Steve noted: a perpetual desire for some sort of political Messiah. When we find a leader who gives us moral guidance, we want to turn them into a political figure, just as the Jews wanted to turn Jesus into a military deliverer.
Jesus, however, rejects this role. He is conspicuously apolitical, while assuming all authority in religious matters. Afterwards, his followers walk a very fine line. On the one hand, they tell his story as the birth of a king, they use overtly political, and even militaristic, language and metaphors (e.g. Revelation) to describe his life and work, and they hail him as the fulfillment of very political OT hopes. And yet they consistently deny that he is a ruler as the world knows them. Indeed, he dies before ever taking the throne.
How do we reconcile these tensions?
The notion of politics vs. religion... What is this vs. business? They both exist for the same reason, no? To fulfill the human need for, and the human need to control. They both exist to create a structure in which human beings can exist within a set of governing rules, and can therefore use the defined rules to define themselves without thought, and define others without any real consideration or personal relationship. Jesus represents the break-down of these structures, both the religious structure of the day, and the political expectations and hence expected political structure of the Jewish Messiah. It is this breakdown, that can free us.
It is this complete 180 from the expectations, both religious and political, that so impacted the followers of Jesus, and is responsible for the dramatic change seen in the individuals around Jesus. This change, and its effects can only occur when we let the gospel challenge our very understanding of our human expectations both religious and political! We do not need to harmonize or reconcile the two tensions... We need to break free from them... Jesus is bigger than a religion, and the effect of the gospel must also be!
I didn't mean that it was a conflict of religion vs. politics. As in, which one is right, and which is wrong. I think both structures do represent the human desire for systems that increase comfort through predictability, if not control.
I was thinking of the tendency to politicize religion on the one hand, and to sanctify politics on the other. Neither attitude is helpful, and yet Jesus is subjected to both.
My original post was trying to emphasize that the expectations that were placed on Jesus - and were considered fulfilled - were indeed political (though not exclusively). I don't think it's adequate, on the one hand, to deny that Jesus was a political figure, as though he just came to bring us "peace in our hearts" without affecting the structures of government. (I think, however, that this is a typical evangelical approach.) On the other hand, I don't think it's right to turn Jesus into a revolutionary, whose sole mission was to "overturn the status quo" and "liberate the proletariat class" by instituting some sort of theocracy. In some ways, I believe Jesus fulfills both of these hopes.
Stanley Hauerwas urges us to consider the "development of virtuous people as a political issue," and this is a striking concept to me, that seems to resolve the aforementioned tension. Virtue, in this sense, must extend beyond more than personal piety however. So what does this look like?
To go back to the idea of tension, I don't think that the tension itself is bad. I also don't think having expectations of Jesus is bad. We need to recognize what those expectations are, and constantly re-evaluate them. But in the very act of making promises, God does invite us to have expectations of God.
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