. . . using the "second service readings" i.e. Isaiah 61, Galatians 3.27 - 4.7 and Luke 2.15-21 :-
“Through faith you are all children of God, in union with Christ Jesus.” Those words were written by the apostle Paul to the Church he helped to found in Galatia; they were originally part of his letter just to them, but they’ve become part of our New Testament scripture because they apply not just to the Galatian church but to every church, and to all who’ve been baptized. All who are baptized are brought into union with Christ.
Or at least, potentially so. As with every other gift, it’s what we do with it that counts. Let’s think about Paul himself for a moment or two, though. Paul had had a good Jewish upbringing in what seems to have been a strict and observant Jewish family. He was schooled as a Pharisee, for which he would have been sent to Jerusalem. There he learned how to apply to the whole of life, to every daily action and decision, the demands of the Law of Moses. Purity was very important to the Pharisees, and all good Jews were very aware of the special status they had as God's chosen people, and very anxious to preserve and protect that status and purity in the potentially difficult situation that Paul’s family would have experienced, of living as Jews within what was a Gentile city, Tarsus in what is now central Turkey. Within his daily morning prayers he would probably have prayed words like these: 'I thank you, Lord, that you have not made me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.'
In those early days he was still called Saul. As a young man in Jerusalem he became aware of a group within the Jewish community who claimed the Messiah had come and had been crucified. The idea of a crucified Messiah was horrifying. It flew in the face of everything Saul believed. He would have been appalled and disgusted at what this new group of followers of Jesus were saying. They needed to be stopped. And so Saul became a zealous persecutor of the followers of this new way. Until, that is, Jesus himself broke through.
In his letter to the Galatians, it seems that Paul is taking that familiar prayer and turning it right round completely. For none of those old distinctions between people matter any more. They’ve all been taken away, for all are now one in Christ.
The writer of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, Luke, was one of the most faithful companions of Paul. We can’t be sure, but he may well not have been a Jew by birth. If so, he was the only one of the Gospel writers not to be. All the Gospel writers have their own particular themes, and an important one for Luke, as he tells the story of Jesus, is the breaking down of barriers. It's Luke who tells us about shepherds coming to worship by the manger. And shepherds were very much looked down on. The work they did prevented them from participating in observant Jewish life; yet it’s to these people that angels first bring the good tidings. Maybe that’s because they were the only people still up and about, but I think there’s more to it than that!
Luke also tells us that Jesus was brought up properly within the Law of Moses; all the right things were done for him as the Law required. But, though the message of God’s salvation comes from the Jews, it is not merely to the Jews. It will go out into all the world. To everyone, Gentile and Jew, man and woman, free man and slave, the door of God’s love is opened. And that, of course, includes us.
So last Tuesday we celebrated the birth, but today we need to go on to think about what that birth means: what it meant then, and what it means now. To us a child is born, to us a son is given. But how does this gift make a difference to you and me? How is the world changed, by God sending his Son to be born among us?
The prophet Isaiah wrote: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” These are wonderful and startling words that are both divinely inspired and intensely personal. In his writing Isaiah suddenly switches from relaying the words of God to saying in the first person that the Spirit is upon ME. You can almost see the flash of light: NOW I see what I have to do, and what message I have to share. It’s about a great Year of Jubilee, which needs to be proclaimed and acted out. The Year of Jubilee is something we can read about in Leviticus - it’s the fiftieth year in which debts are cancelled and land is returned to its original owner: and the reason why that happens is to do with being the people of God, and knowing as God’s people that we belong together, and that all that we have, and the land we hold, is actually his. It all belongs to the Lord. We are merely stewards, and it’s out duty as stewards to use what we have in accordance with what our Lord requires.
So Isaiah calls for a Year of Jubilee that will bring justice for those are depressed, downhearted, and imprisoned, and freedom and comfort for his people. And in all of this God will be glorified. Jesus read this passage to the people of his own home town, and declared, 'Today, in your hearing, these words are fulfilled.' But the very fact that shepherds were told the good news at the time of his birth points ahead to what will happen.
Although, as I’ve said, shepherds were outsiders and looked down by the religious elite, shepherd is also one of the great titles God claims for himself, perhaps most beautifully in the 23rd Psalm - but also in, for example, the Book of Ezekiel. And Jesus will claim the title of 'Good Shepherd'; he told his disciples that 'the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.' Shepherds are there to serve, to guide and to protect - that’s the job they do; and in the process of doing that job they may well need to risk their own lives. God's anointed Messiah is anointed both to serve and to suffer. The task before him is nothing less than the setting free of all God’s people: their salvation and restoration. And to achieve this the Christ will lay down his own life.
It was realising this that changed Saul the persecutor into Paul the apostle. And for us? If we celebrate Christmas without seeing what this child will grow up to do, we only have half the story, or indeed less than that. The road begun at the crib must lead to the cross: it’s all one story. And that cross, as Paul came to understand, is what brings all people together. The divisions perpetuated by the Law are removed: everyone has an equal right to stand in God's presence.
And to stand as his children. In those days a child, however well born, had no authority over his own life until he made the transformation to adulthood that for a Jewish child would be bar-mitzvah, becoming a son of the Law, or for a Greek child the ceremonial cutting of the long hair of childhood to make him a full member of the patria or clan, or for a Roman child the day on which his childhood toys were offered to the god Apollo, to show he was now a man and had put away childish things. Paul writes to the Galatians that will now they’ve been only children, but in Christ they’ve been given the status of sons. So the challenge now is to grow to full spiritual adulthood.
A similar question for the Church today might be 'Are we talking about Jesus, or living with him?' Are we engaged in the work Isaiah the prophet proclaimed, which Jesus took as his manifesto? Do captives find release here, do the broken hearted find healing, is there oil of gladness to replace the tears of those who mourn? On New Year’s Day the Church commemorates the naming and the circumcision of Jesus, which was done by custom on the eighth day after his birth. The name 'Jesus' in fact means 'The Lord saves'; and if we are Jesus people, then his name becomes ours, and so does the work he does. Shepherds came to worship a baby; the man he grew to be calls us to travel with him, to make space for the needy, to be a church for all: he is love born among us, so may his love flow through us, lighting new lights of love for the salvation of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment