As we come to the end of one year and prepare for the next, the news media is alive with commentary from the past twelve months and predictions for the New Year. Indeed as one year closes and another opens there is an underlying fear amongst many.
As we think about the future a good question to ask is, ‘What on earth is God doing?’ The first sentence of one of the great chapters of the Bible, Isaiah 40, tells us: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Written more than two and a half millennia ago, there’s a timelessness about these words as they speak to people in every age. As a lover speaking tenderly to someone he loves, God says to his people: ‘Comfort.’ And the tenderness of his language continues in Isaiah 40:11: He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom…
SERVING A BIG GOD
At the start of a new year it’s good to ask who God is and what he is like. Only a big God can inspire us and keep going in challenging times. This is the God Isaiah speaks about.
Towards the end of this uplifting chapter that speaks of the uniqueness and the greatness of God, Isaiah points out that this God has power enough to sustain us in every situation in life. In Isaiah 40:29 we read: He gives power to the faint, and gives strength to the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
I wonder how we might have written the last two lines. Is not our natural inclination to think of walking, running and then moving to a climax, soaring higher and higher like eagles? But Isaiah’s order makes more sense for he has identified what life with God is really like. When we are faced with difficulties in life, what we need is not the soaring flight of an eagle but rather the determined endurance of a long-distance walker.
Flights of spiritual experience are of no use if they are followed immediately by plunges into dark depression. Walk and not faint. That’s what we need when we are faced with challenges and situations we don’t understand. We need the strength that only God can provide us.
WHEN THE NEW YEAR DOESN’T SEEM ‘NEW’
There may be some reading this who are privately weeping or who are bitter or resentful. You may be finding it hard to believe, hard to pray, hard to sing, even hard to read the Bible. Isaiah is telling us that God has not forgotten us.
We need to listen afresh to Isaiah’s words and fill our minds with the awesome majesty and love of God. The greatness of God’s power is matched by his love and compassion. This is why the opening words to Isaiah 40, ‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ are not empty or meaningless. Even in the midst of the worst situations in life, God provides us with the strength we need to endure.
GOD WITH US
Indeed, as we now read these words through the lens of the birth of Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection, we have even more reason to be assured by what Isaiah wrote. For as the Christmas season reminds us, we have the evidence of God at work in the world through the One who is called Emmanuel – God with us.
Here is the God worth knowing – the awesome and true God, who is Lord of all. Young men will grow weary. Their energy will pass and the fruit of all their successes will one day be nothing but dust for historians to record. But God’s people will never die out because of the coming of Jesus Christ, the one who supremely reveals the glory of God.
As we stand on the threshold of a new year, Isaiah’s words can inspire us. So important is the news of God’s love and forgiveness that it can’t be contained. God’s gospel must be shouted from the rooftops – not just in the cities of Judah, but to the nations of the world: Get you up on the high mountain, O Zion, heralds of good tidings, lift up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’
In the New Year let’s play our part in introducing our friends, family and colleagues to the God who is truly worth knowing.
Why the Shepherds? Why did the angel announce Jesus’ birth to shepherds? Given the resources of heaven they could have pulled off one very spectacular announcement in Bethlehem or, come to think of it, in Jerusalem.
We need to go back to the story of ancient Israel. Prophets such as Ezekiel spoke of the kings of Israel as shepherds. But Ezekiel knew what many of them were like: self-indulgent, exploiting people and plundering their property. In Ezekiel’s time Israel had been conquered by the Babylonians. Jerusalem was in ruins and its people were in exile. Ezekiel 34 tells us it was the fault of the shepherds.
Ezekiel’s good news was that God would raise up a new and perfect king – a shepherd-king – in the line of king David, but greater than David. So it was that the angel announced to the shepherds:“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord”(Luke 2:10f).
It was the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s promise that God himself would raise up a ruler, a shepherd-king, who would do things that Israel’s kings hadn’t done— restore the weak and gather the lost. “Then they will know that I the Lord their God am with them” Ezekiel said (34:30). It was good news.
At the time of Jesus’ birth the shepherds were at the bottom of the social order. They were the lost, the outsiders. Yet it was to them the angel made the announcement.
And there is something significant about the place where Jesus was born. Dr Kenneth Bailey has recently raised questions about our culture’s Christmas story. Our story is that Jesus was born in a barn or a stable because there was no room in the local inn. But when we look more carefully at the Bible text another picture emerges.
NO ROOM AT THE INN?
In Luke 2:7 we read: And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.‘Inn’ is not really the best translation of the original word. The usual Greek word for ‘inn’ is found in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:34). The word in Luke 2 is the word katalyma, literally meaning ‘a place to stay’ or ‘guest room’. We find this once more in Luke’s Gospel – the ‘guest room’ in a private house in Jerusalem where Jesus planned to celebrate the Passover with his disciples (22:11).
In Jesus’ day poorer families lived in homes with one large extended room. Sometimes there was a ‘guest room’ on the same level or on the roof. And there was always a small area at ground level under the same roof where the family animals were kept at night to keep them secure.
Luke is telling us that there was literally no room, ‘no place’ in the guest room of a private home. A member of the House of David, Joseph would have had a welcoming family in Bethlehem to take them both in. However the guest room was already occupied. Mary had to make do for the birth of Jesus in the living room. What’s more, she used the cattle feeding-trough or manger, set up at the end of the raised floor of the living room to lay the baby down.
The announcement of the birth of Jesus Christ to shepherds is very significant for it tells us that God has reached down from the glory of highest heaven to rescue and transform the lives of the lowliest, even the outcasts. Furthermore, if the angel had told the shepherds that they would find the baby in the home of a highly placed or wealthy official they would have hesitated to go and see him. Instead of asking if they were dreaming or discussing miracles, they said, “Let’s go and see this baby for ourselves.”
Their response sets us a challenge. We weren’t there that night, but we have the record of eyewitnesses. Like the shepherds we need to find out for ourselves whether this baby is as special as those eyewitnesses made out. It means carrying out our own investigation and encouraging everyone we know to do the same – perhaps by giving them a gift of one of the Gospels to read.
Too often we fail to find the joy and peace of Christmas because we have not truly found God’s shepherd-king ourselves. As circumstances have recently reminded me, we are all in need of a savior – someone to whom we need to apologize and whose forgiveness we need to ask. Only when we turn to Jesus and meet him personally in this way will we be able to say to one another and really mean it, ‘Merry Christmas’.
May you know the joy, peace and goodwill that the message of Christmas brings us – during this Christmas season and in the New Year.
One of the encouraging things I love about the Bible is that it allows us to express our feelings. What is more, God understands us and works with us and through us for his greater purposes.
Matthew 1:20 records Joseph’s reaction to the news that Mary was pregnant with a word that is usually translated, ‘pondered’ or ‘considered’. However, as Kenneth Bailey in his Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (IVP: Academic, 2008, p.44f) comments, another meaning of the original verb is ‘became angry’ or ‘upset’. This alternative helps us understand how Joseph who is spoken of as ‘being a just man’, would have felt – disappointed and betrayed, even angry.
Joseph had a problem: Mary was pregnant and he knew he wasn’t the father. Apart from the shame of an illegitimate baby, could he trust her? Significantly, it was at this point an angel spoke to him in a dream: “Joseph, Son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 1:20). God was sensitive to Joseph’s feelings.
GOD INCARNATE
We can only begin to appreciate how Joseph must have felt. For a young woman to conceive a baby without sexual intercourse at the time of the first century Roman Empire was much more than the skills specialists in gynecology offer today. Joseph was being told by the angel that God was doing the unthinkable – taking on human form. Heaven was coming to earth.
Joseph could have continued with his plan, quietly to divorce Mary. It says a great deal about his faith and character that he took her home as his wife. How did he come to believe something so completely out of the ordinary?
He may have believed Mary’s news because it was so extraordinary. But, because he knew the Scriptures, there were other reasons too. He knew that God from time to time involved himself, even interfered, in human affairs for the good of his people. So it was now not out of the realm of possibility that God who had created men and women in his image, could take on human form.
And there is something else we usually overlook. We can appreciate that Joseph who is described as ‘just’ or ‘righteous’ (1:19) would have divorced Mary as the law of Moses prescribed. What is striking however, is that he intended to do this ‘privately’ rather than publicly shame her.
Kenneth Bailey (p.44) suggests that Joseph was willing to do this because of his understanding of the God of the Bible. God is patient and longsuffering and, above all, compassionate (as we see for example in Isaiah 42:1-9. Despite his first response of disappointment, even anger, Joseph did not want to bring down the full force of the law on Mary but rather treat her with compassion because she was ‘weak and exhausted’.
GOD DWELLING AMONG US
What Joseph knew of God from the Bible together with the unexpected and extraordinary nature of the angel’s announcement – an experience he could not deny – convinced him that, strange though it seemed, Mary’s baby was God taking on human form and coming to earth.
G.K. Chesterton once observed: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
The angel’s words are unexpected and extra-ordinary. They speak of a God who was willing to come out of the silence of the universe and become one of us. He understands our emotions and works with them, as he did with Joseph’s. Indeed, the nature of Jesus’ birth is most encouraging, for it speaks of a God who is not aloof but approachable, not condemning but compassionate. Joseph may not then have understood it all, but he believed it. Do you?
A few of us were recently discussing the probability of the universe coming together by chance. Musing on this I asked, ‘I wonder what proportion of eminent scientists who say we exist by chance purchase lottery tickets?’
William Lane Craig in chapter 2 of his Reasonable Faith (1994) points out that This is a wager that all men must make—the game is in progress and a bet must be laid. There is no option: you have already joined the game…’
‘The choice should be made pragmatically in terms of maximizing one’s happiness,’ Craig notes Pascal saying. ‘If one wagers that God exists and he does, one has gained eternal life and infinite happiness. If he does not exist, one has lost nothing. On the other hand, if one wagers that God does not exist and he does, then one has suffered infinite loss. If he does not in fact exist, then one has gained nothing. Hence, the only prudent choice is to believe that God exists.’
In the last section of Luke 12 we read Jesus’ words about God’s impending judgment. Some who were listening to him asked him about an atrocity committed by Pilate. Apparently he had mingled the blood of some Galileans with their sacrifices (13:1), perhaps at Passover time. Jesus’ answer is clear but his words are tough: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did…” (13:2-3).
Jesus is saying, ‘You are all guilty before God and justly deserving death. Be warned: men and women are out of step with their Maker’. Every earthquake and flood, every conflict and war is testimony to that. Life is unpredictable and temporary. We need to wake up to this and turn back to God while we have time. One day there will be a world without pain, but it will have to be a world without sin.
CHOICES
Jesus tells us that the choice we have is not only difficult but vital. To underline his point he told a parable about decisions gardeners have to make at times – to get rid of unproductive trees or to wait and see. Wise gardeners wait. They feed a plant, prune it and fertilize it. Only when it fails to respond do they pull it out: “Let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down” (13:8-9).
Our family experienced this back in the 1980s when a couple of large eucalyptus trees, growing on land adjacent to our house, were apparently dying as the result of prolonged drought. I began watering around the roots, setting up sprinklers every evening. Gradually, as the water soaked into the ground and was absorbed by the roots, the trees regenerated and produced new growth.
There are times when we are tempted to think that Jesus will never return. But we should not confuse ‘patience’ with ‘indifference’. The fact that God does not intervene in a situation of injustice does not mean he is indifferent. Rather, as we read in 2 Peter 3:8-9, he is being patient.
ETERNITY
For many of his hearers that day, there were two critical events that would touch their lives – the first, his crucifixion and resurrection; the second, the fall of Jerusalem (see also 13:34-35; 19:41-44).
Jesus is saying that a third crisis is yet to come which will affect the whole world. For centuries the Jewish people had been waiting for the dawn of the age of the Messiah. ‘Well,’ says Jesus, ‘it is here; you are standing on the threshold of the new age, the edge of eternity.’
Jesus asks us the same question today: ‘How is it that you do not see the signs of the times in which you live?’ None of us can predict the future, but we can know for sure that one day Jesus will come again – it will be truly ‘the return of the king’. The second ‘coming’ will be very different from his first, for it will not be a hidden event seen only by a few, but will come with great fanfare and seen by everyone.
If we are tempted to doubt Jesus’ words we should note that the first two of his predictions have occurred! The probability of his third prediction happening is extraordinarily high.
Life can be so messy. Why doesn’t God step in now and bring to justice the perpetrators of wars, injustice and evil? These are real questions for us and for people we know.
SEASON OF ADVENT
The season of Advent is a good time to reflect on Jesus’ words about a day of reckoning (Luke 12:35-48). “You must also be ready, for the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour,” he says (Luke 12:40). And, “…From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded,” we read in Luke 12:48.
Two metaphors speak of an end-of-time day.The first is a picture of a wealthy man away from home at an important wedding. The man’s servants, Jesus says, must be ready for his return no matter how late the hour: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him when he comes and knocks” (12:35-36).
The second is a picture of a homeowner whose mud-brick house is broken into (12:39). ‘The thief could not get away with his crime,’ Jesus says, ‘unless he had chosen an hour when he caught the homeowner unawares; if the owner had known, he would have taken precautions.’ Watchfulness is the overriding theme.
While some debate the precise reference of ‘the coming’ to which Jesus referred, either his death and resurrection, or his coming in glory, the dominating theme is the latter. With Jesus’ return, God’s judgment will be complete. Jesus’ words about justice and the temporary nature of wealth and possessions about which he has just spoken (Luke 12:1-12 and 12:13-34), will be shown to be all too true.
The two word pictures suggest three elements to the timing of his coming. It is imminent,the master could return at any time; there is delay, the master seems to be taking his time. We see this in 12:38 where Jesus said that it may be the second or the third watch in the night, that is, the early hours of the morning, when the master returns. And there is a third element: it will come as a surprise. In 12:39 the householder does not know when the thief will come.
It’s easy to miss the force of these pictures. Jesus is saying we need to live with the tension of imminence and delay. In the same way the servants needed to be ready for the return of their master – which could happen at any moment – we need to be ready for the return of Jesus.
Our problem is that we tend to ignore this reality. After all, two thousand years have come and gone and nothing has happened. We let ourselves drift into spiritual complacency. Yes, some who claim to follow Jesus Christ are constantly looking for signs. Some even set a date and, as occurred in May 2011, dispose of all their material possessions. But they ignore Jesus’ words: ‘When the day comes, it will come as a surprise. You won’t know when to expect it.’
Jesus wants us to balance the elements of imminence and delay. We make a serious mistake if we think we know the time of his return. Jesus said that not even he knew the time (Matthew 24:36).
ANGLICAN ADVENT
In this mean-time we need to get on with life, going to school or work, keeping on top of our expenses, and living in a way that reflects the reality of our relationship with Jesus. The return of the king will surprise us all. So we need to live with the expectation of it in our hearts.
And with that expectation we can be comforted with the assurance that justice will be done – all wrongs will be perfectly addressed. The question is, ‘Are we ready?’ for we too will be called to account. (1)
Note 1: My ‘Word’ this week is adapted from my commentary, Luke – An Unexpected God, Aquila, 2012, p.183f
