Isaiah 61.1-11, John 1.6-8, 19-28
The Third Sunday of Advent, 17 December 2023, Clapham
Have you noticed how, at the beginning of their lives, Jesus was always one step behind John. John’s birth was announced first; Jesus was born six months after him. Whilst Mary’s song of praise, the Magnificat, is the one we most remember, her cousin Elizabeth earlier sang her own song of praise which was also about God favouring her, among women, with the child John in her womb.
And when the boys grew into men it was John who led Jesus into a life of missionary activity. For Jesus was a disciple of John. Jesus was among the crowds who gathered at the River Jordan to hear John entreating them to make way for God to come into their lives, to straighten them out, to set them on a new path. Jesus was one of the great unwashed who stepped into the waters to receive John’s ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. [1]
And there, the Baptist told the crowds about Jesus, saying, ‘Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’
Among you stands one whom you do not know. Interesting to consider how, towards the premature end of his life, John questioned who Jesus was. Remember how, whilst in Herod’s jail, John sent his disciples to ask Jesus, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ [2] It was as if he didn’t know him, or at least, that he’d lost confidence in who Jesus was.
Among you stands one whom you do not know. What seems to have happened is that, from having always been one step behind John, Jesus had now moved one step ahead. And John was having trouble recognising, in Jesus, the Messiah he’d been expecting, because of the surprising ways Jesus was going about things.
John wasn’t the only one. You remember when Jesus stood up in front of his family and neighbours in Nazareth and quoted the prophet Isaiah: as a statement setting out his intentions for his ministry. Compare the start of today's reading from Isaiah, with what Jesus said on that occasion:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ [2]
Among you stands one whom you do not know. Why did the home-town crowd turn against Jesus at that point? Was it because he, one of their own, was suggesting that God loved people from outside their tribe just as much - if not more - than them, that the good news for the poor wasn’t just for their poor, but for all poor, everywhere. Or was it that they noticed, as we may have, what phrases Jesus significantly decided to leave out of his quote from the prophet?
Jesus' statement combines two passages, in Isaiah 61 and 58. [3] What is notable about Jesus's selection is that he leaves out the bits about vengeance and nationalism. You’ll notice that Isaiah 61.2 proclaims, ‘the day of vengeance of our God’. But Jesus stops short of this, and also excludes Isaiah’s later claim that Israel shall have for itself the wealth of the nations, while the other nations will end up with nothing but God's vengeance heaped upon them. [4]
Those things were - and are - the conventional messianic dream of oppressed people. When we take over, we will be on top. Those who have oppressed us will be on the first track out. Jesus wants no part of that. He would demonstrate his good news by persistently befriending the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He kept on like that until he fell victim to the rich and the powerful. Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave's ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to bless his fellow condemned. There we see Jesus' messianic mission, the epiphany of God's glory in action. [5]
Among you stands one whom you do not know. Now we begin to see why John came to question what Jesus was doing. Because no messiah in history had ever before renounced vengeance. Only Jesus. No saviour in history had ever extended salvation to those outside his nation. Except Jesus.
John was wrapped up in the world of vengeance. Witness his conflict with Herod which resulted in John’s cruel execution in the king’s palace. John had preached about a Last Judgment where the Judge would come carrying tools of destruction, wielding lethal fire. John’s Judgement provoked in his listeners a fear that motivated their good works and virtuous behaviour. John had seen the light coming in the form of Jesus, but he found it almost impossible to comprehend. [6]
Among you stands one whom you do not know. The early Christians lived in small communities devoted to mutual care and support, and refused to serve in the military. But it wasn’t long before the institutional church began to turn its back on the peaceful Christ, as in the Fourth Century the Roman Emperor Constantine assimilated the Christian faith, generating the ideas that Christ’s ‘everlasting kingdom of love and peace’ could be brought about through conventional power politics; and that human beings could be induced into the kingdom of heaven by force.
So Christianity came to accept the very vengeance and nationalism which Jesus deliberately excluded from his Nazareth mission statement. And this acceptance prompted the violence of the Crusades, the Pilgrim Fathers’ brutal subjugation of the first peoples of America, and the aggressive missionary activity which was an essential arm of colonial empire-building.
This is our inheritance, described by Ivan Illich as ‘the troubled legacy of Christendom ... the terrible perversion that comes of love and truth when these are underwritten by institutional power.’ [7] This inheritance, this forgetting of the peaceful Christ, explains how, in our place and time, industrial chaplains can sanctify the manufacture of fighter jets which bomb civilian populations to extinction; how bishops can stand beside monarchs in military dockyards applauding the launch of nuclear submarines; and how patriarchs can address warmongering presidents as being the saviours of their people. [8]
This is our savage inheritance. It is powerful, yet, although it is hard to resist, it is not impossible. For still, among us, stands one whom we do not know. He will prevail, for all the love in the world is his. Among us stands one whom we do not know: and who longs to reveal to us ever more fully the breadth of his love and the strength of his peace.
And so, whilst some religious people will aggressively oppose it, his everlasting kingdom of love and peace will continue to grow, through those who have seen the light coming in the form of Jesus, and who will follow it, however difficult it may be, at times, to comprehend.
Notes
[1] Luke 3.3.
[2] Matthew 11.2-6.
[2] Luke 4.18-19
[3] Isaiah 61.1-2a, Isaiah 58.6
[4] Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, in Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c
[5] Fred Niedner, Living by the Word: Taking the Good News home, The Christian Century, Jan. 3, 2001, quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c.
[6] See my earlier sermons, Christmas is really for the children, Somerset, 2014, and The judgement of Jesus and the judgement of John, Devon, 2012.
[7] Marcus Peter Rempel, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross Culture Stories, p.13, 19ff; Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, p.119. Rempel engages with Ivan Illich's writings on "the troubled legacy of Christendom ... the terrible perversion that comes of love and truth when these are underwritten by institutional power." (p.12). As quoted in my sermon, John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse, Corton Denham, 17 December 2017.
[8] Campaign Against the Arms Trade, ISRAEL: The UK has consistently sold arms to Israel, in spite of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem since 1967; Launch Of The Royal Navys Newest Super Submarine, Getty Images News, 8 June 2007; Gleb Bryanski, Russian patriarch calls Putin era "miracle of God", Reuters, 8 February, 2012.
Comments