A Savior, Who Is Christ The Lord

My family is looking forward to the Avengers 4 movie coming out in a few months. This past November 13th, a day after Stan Lee of Marvel Comics died, I listened to an interview with Brad Meltzer (by Glenn Beck on The Glenn Beck Radio Program), author of many children’s books, including a book on comic books. Meltzer talked about how Stan Lee may have been our time’s closest thing to Walt Disney. His comics taught principles to live by, they taught us to be good to others because it’s the right thing to do, not out of expectation of a reward. In keeping with this, comic books have been effective in our country because they have been tailored to particular time periods and those time periods’ needs. Superheroes have often come on the scene when people have felt powerless. And so comic books thrived in the Great Depression, in WWII, in the Cold War when people felt powerless against nuclear missiles, and then after a gap, in the last couple of decades. People in these time periods didn’t necessarily get the hero they wanted, but they got the one they needed. The Great Depression had the heroes of tarzan and flash Gordon; people needed to be transported to a different place like the jungle or the 25th century because life around them was so tough. During WWII the country was afraid as the enemy encroached upon our shores; and then in stepped very powerful Superman to save us. After 9/11 many people were saying we’d never laugh again. The movie that broke through the public consciousness was Spiderman. We weren’t a country of invincible supermen anymore; like Spiderman we were vulnerable but wanted to give it everything we had. And ever since we’ve been in a superhero movie boom where even the bad movies make 100s of millions of dollars. Most of these movies have been based on Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. The success of these movies shows that we’re still starving for heroes. We need to see that good is going to triumph over the very real evil that we face. This is where Marvel Comics have shined. Stan Lee’s heroes are real, with real issues. In the case of Spiderman, it was his fault his uncle was killed; Ironman before he was Ironman was a rich and self-centered drunk who could care less about the world; and Thor may have been the god of thunder, but his origin story was that his father Oden banished him from his home planet so that he could be humbled because he was so full of himself. Lee’s heroes resonate with our stories and teach us about ourselves and our needs today. Thus Stan Lee himself said long ago that he was trying to teach us to be real heroes living in the image of God.

I thought of Stan Lee and his comics as I prepared for the sermon this evening from Luke 2. As Luke narrates the birth of Jesus, he shows how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament; but Luke also more so than any other Gospel shows the Roman audience of the time how Jesus was of benefit to them in a way that they could understand, as a sort of hero. Accordingly, Luke in our text lists the name of the hero Jesus in a way that Luke’s Roman audience could understand. We’ll use that name as our sermon title: A Savior, Who Is Christ the Lord.

The title A Savior, Who Is Christ the Lord is a very Greco-Roman way of describing Jesus, as we’ll see in a moment. But first we should say that Luke as a good historian writing according to general standards within the Roman Empire gives us the most complete account of all of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth and how these fit into Judaism. First, our text mentions a census that causes Joseph to come to Bethlehem, which Luke calls the city of David. This recalls king David being from Bethlehem and also recalls David conducting an ill-conceived census at the end of his life just before appointing his son to be king. Jesus is the true king and son of David. Next our text records the birth of Jesus and emphasizes that Jesus as the Messiah was born in a manger. The scholar Raymond Brown says of this,

This manger is not a sign of poverty but is probably meant to evoke God's complaint against Israel in Isaiah 1:3: “The ox knows its owner and the donkey knows the manger of its lord; but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me.” Luke is proclaiming that the Isaian dictum has been repealed. (“Meaning of the Manger, the Significance of the Shepherds”)

The next part of our text is the appearance of the angels to the shepherds in the field. This episode likely again recalls King David, who was a shepherd in Bethlehem when he was called to be king. Finally, our text records what the shepherds did. They come to the manger to see the sign of the baby in swaddling cloths lying in a manger. This seems to fulfill another passage from Isaiah, the very familiar one from Isaiah 7 where a sign will be given to Israel as a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel. Our text concludes with many people wondering at the sign of Jesus’ birth, including the virgin herself, Mary.