Advent 3 (Year B)
The Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted.
A commodity in short supply at this moment in our world is that of hope. People are concerned about the economic down turn that is robbing them of joy & peace of mind about the future & is instead filling them with dread and possibly even fear. If you look at the newspapers you can see this in every area of human activity & every area of the globe: Zimbabwe, once one of the most prosperous & settled lands in the African continent now a place of devastation & despair; the large cities of Sth. America & Asia where just about as many people live in shanty towns as those in the settled cities; our own land & many others in the affluent west where the fear of economic recession & unemployment dominate the headlines. Yes, heading toward Christmas this year there is a distinct lack of good cheer for many. So what do these readings for today say to us?
They all speak about a restored community instead of a community which is dominated by desolation. They point to a time when the darkness will be lifted & all will live in the light.
The prophet Isaiah was writing at the point when the Jewish people had been given their freedom & restored to their lands by Cyrus the Great, who had defeated the Babylonians. They had been in exile for approx 50 years & in that time they had become a people who believed that their God was of no relevance to their situation or worse had abandoned them. They return to their homeland & they find devastation: they can sit down & cry just as they had done by the rivers of Babylon or they could do something about it. If you cannot imagine it then think of when people returned to their bombed & destroyed cities after the Second World War in so many parts of mainland Europe only to discover there was nothing there only the ruins & the rubble. It must have been the most appalling thing for them where would they begin – everything, absolutely everything had gone. For where do you begin when there is nothing? It must have been overwhelming but slowly & surely they did begin. I would imagine they didn’t even realise it was happening but it just did, as they settled down & the weeks & months turned into years. How did they manage it?
In the book of Isaiah God addresses the human condition. A character appears in the midst of the shambles that is life & announces he has been commissioned by God to bring good news. The person makes good his claim by stating he has been anointed by God: anointing being a sign of God’s marking out the person for a task: Zadok the priest anointed Solomon king; his father had been anointed by Samuel in front of all his brothers when the Spirit of God had rested on him, & at various times in the history of Isarel the great prophets & kings are anointed. Curiously this anointing finds echoes of its symbolism in the coronation service of our own sovereigns to this day.
The servant, the one who is anointed will bring good news to the afflicted, the broken hearted; he will bind up, he will proclaim the favour of the lord. This person, for it is not God speaking at this moment in the story, is to bring hope to a people without hope, who have lived in darkness & experienced great tribulation. It is heady stuff but it is not pie in the sky, rather a promise of a bright new future. Those people who returned to Jerusalem amidst the ruins: they were going to be given comfort in their mourning, garlands instead of ashes, a spirit of encouragement & boldness instead of tentative footsteps in their way forward. This was no less than a declaration of new life out of the ruins of lives that had gone before. It is fabulous stuff because when people have nowhere to go, no one to turn to they will sink even further into the quagmire of despair or worse follow some demagogue who promises them heaven on earth.
God we read then intervenes in the story in that the declaration is made that this new order will be founded on justice for all & a rejection of that which is wrong. It is nothing less than the cry of the prophets down thru’ the years reminding the people of Israel that God is a just God & to live with him is to live with justice & righteousness.
In our gospel reading we read of John the Baptist just as we did last week but here there is a slightly different angle. John claims that the one who is to come is the light by which the world will be transformed. The religious authorities conscious of the teaching of Isaiah want to know more. They want to ascertain if John is the one spoken of in the prophecy but he assures them he is not. He is not one of the great of Israel’s faith: he is not Elijah or the prophet Moses in fact he is not even fit to tie the laces of the sandal of the one who will bring God’s kingdom into reality. In fact Jesus ministry begins with the words from Isaiah chapter 61 read today. John is just the messenger for the one who is in their midst but whom they do not recognise.
This is a great theme of this gospel: Jesus in the midst of the ruins that are lives living with all the pain & hurt in them & the people do not recognise him. The gospel writer makes this assertion right here at the beginning of his gospel because this is his whole point in writing the book. The people didn’t know him yet he lived among them “full of grace & truth” as the following verses proclaim. John the Baptist in this gospel, unlike the Marcan account we read last week is telling the people the Holy One is here, the one who will lead you from the devastation of so much that is life, from mourning & timidity to gladness & confidence. The authorities must have been challenged by this teaching & remember this John was the very one who challenged the political leaders also. He was no coward but nor was he the one people thought he might be. He knew his role was to point to the light that was to come to lighten the world & he was shouting it as loud as he could. The one who was to come was the one who would herald in the Kingdom of God, not a pie in the sky dream but the new reality for Israel & for all who would believe in God. A new order where justice would be loved & evil condemned. This one who was to come would proclaim the day of the Lord had come & all humanity would have to choose: walk in the light or follow the way of darkness.
In this season of Advent we remind ourselves of this because we come into this period ready to celebrate the birth of the one who defined not only the social & religious order of his day but time itself. The Christian church now takes up the role of John & points to the light which has come amidst the ruin of this all too often evil world. So hope is not just an I want a new world, a better world but a commitment to working toward it by following in the way of the one who is light for the world. Will this change things immediately? No. But it will allow people to see that no matter how wrecked life may appear God will enable us to transform the wreckage & make something new. The Christian doctrine of hope is nothing less than a challenge to humanity to make a better world for those whose lives, whether they be in Zimbabwe, a shanty town in Asia or the streets of Glasgow because of economic circumstances a new creation from out of the ruins that all too often passes for life.
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