Icon of the Deesis - St. Catherine's Monastery Sinai, 12th century
Our God reigns. Where does he reign? First of all, in the human heart. But it does not end there. It is more than that. Much more: The personal stories of the holy families of Old Testament and New begin personally, with old couples, young women, widows, children, but the implications are divine.
Imagine Abraham and Sarah, wandering from Iraq across Syria into Palestine and down into Egypt then back into Palestine, all the time hoping the promise would be fulfilled, keeping the faith that someday she would have a child of her own, and they would settle down in the land of promise.
Imagine their daughter-in-law Rebecca wanting a son, waiting for a child, hoping for that vindication after years of barrenness. And her daughter-in-law Rachel, in turn, in hopes of waiting.
They each had hope fulfilled, holy promise kept. Isaac was born to Sarah, Jacob was born to Rebecca, and Rachel had her two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. They were not the last.
Naomi returned from across the Jordan to her native village and her daughter-in-law bore a son so precious to her that people said, “Naomi had a son.” It was Jesse, whose descendant was David. (And from the house of David was to come the Messiah.)
Elkanah, a pious man, went to the temple to pray every year, and his wife Hannah went with him. But into her old age she too wanted and wept for lack of a son. In the temple she prayed and the priest discovered her. And God fulfilled her wish - her son was Samuel who became the prophet who anointed David.
And then here at last, at the end of the old story and the beginning of the new, an elderly, pious, childless couple, faithful to the Lord, are blessed with a child. Like Hannah, Elizabeth feels vindicated: a weight has lifted. And her joy is more than personal: it is as if Israel had awaited vindication, a new hope, a promise of ages come true.
The old stories, the old songs, the old promises: all these are brought into a new era.
They were scary times. The nation was divided into hostile camps. Compromisers, survivalists, puritanical rule-keepers, insurrectionists. Contention. Mistrust. Fear.
Sadducees were accommodationists, who cut a deal with Herod the Great, awarded rule of Palestine by Caesar Augustus the emperor across the sea. Essenes were separatists, who withdrew from society to keep themselves perfect and safe. Pharisees sought to redeem themselves through piety and purity, keeping the letter of the law and sometimes its spirit. Zealots were all for combat; they brought down the wrath of Rome on everybody’s head.
And then there were those odd birds, the followers of -- hope.
Hope. Built on an ancient promise. A series of minor miracles. Long stories long told. Of people who kept faith through dark times, who spoke gratitude when things changed. Whose children grew up with the knowledge of God, and found their way to faith in turn.
It was the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise of ages. It was not yet the new thing. It was at once both the last of the old and the first of the new. But it was not yet fully time. The new would come. And here was the son, and here the promise, here the proclamation. And hear the good news!
***
So we see that Zechariah and Elizabeth and John, like Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, like Rebecca and Isaac and Jacob, like Hannah and Elkanah and Samuel, saw the fulfillment of long held hopes and ancient expectations. And so the traditions and practices of Israel continued into their time. Of course there was a complication. The Romans.
Greg Woolf, historian of ancient Rome, refers to emperors as ‘embodied symbols’. Where the emperor was, the empire was too. But emperors could not be everywhere imperial presence was needed. In their stead, as Laura Hollengreen has taught me, the Romans put up, in their law courts, statues of empires, to represent the living symbol that was (as the saying goes) just a man. Statues then represented the presence of the emperor and the empire.
We certainly did not want to see one in the Holy of Holies, or even in the sacred city. But they were there, in proxy, in the emperor’s good friend Herod, at the time of John’s birth.
The last of the prophets, the greatest of them, would herald not only the fulfillment of old promises, but the advent of a new era. And in this era the titles and claims of Messiah and of Son of David would come into clashing conflict with the “king of kings” and ‘son of God’ that the emperor styled himself to be.
We can learn from this as we reflect on our own times, when divided nations have factions that variously choose to accommodate or combat or influence or withdraw from the mixing of peoples and ideas and values that comes with a cosmopolitan society. We do not have the embodied presence of an emperor, or statues in his stead. What then do we have? What is the imperial hegemony, the dominant power structure, we swim in, like goldfish in a bowl?
Like the old fish in the joke, you may encounter young fish who do not even know they are swimming.
But it’s there. Walter Wink wrote about the powers that be, the ‘principalities and powers’ of our time that William Stringfellow and James Wm. McClendon also warned against, who now inhabit our lives.
We struggle against the unseen - or the unnamed - just as much as the Jews, Sadducees and Pharisees and Essenes and Zealots, did against the visible imperial foe of their time.
So John the Baptist when he came had a lot to do. He was the herald, the precursor. Prepare ye the way of the Lord! he cried. As the way through the desert welcomed their ancestors home from exile, as the dry land cleared the way on the exodus from Egypt, so now John would be the one to clear the way for the arrival of the long expected savior.
He would do it, as we know, through a symbol of his own: a cleansing immersion in the Jordan, the river that the people had crossed centuries before to reach the promised land.
Come out from the cities, into the wild country, come home to the places where God reigns. Not a threat or terror, but the place where God had led them before: as our service sometimes says, through the desert, past the parted waters, led day and night, to home.
That is what the herald of Messiah was calling them to do; he was calling the people again to be the people of God, and to get ready: the day was coming.
It will be a day of fear, of terror, and of obedience. But first and last it will be a day of joy.
The presence of the Lord! He is on the way: get ready.
Prepare your hearts and make him room.
JRL+
The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold : Luke 1.5-25
Responsorial Canticle: Isaiah 40:1-5, 40:9; 60:1-3 (KJV)
Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Lutheran Church of the Foothills, Tucson. https://youtu.be/gF4Yeo-DFpQ
