Crying In The Wilderness

I expect most of you know by now that we have a homegrown preacher next week. Our newest deacon, Drew Johnson, is going to be my sub on December 26 while I’m off basking in sunny Minneapolis. He’s been up here before, of course: many of you remember when he was a shepherd in our Christmas pageant a few years ago. Imagine what you’d think if, when he came to the pulpit to speak, he started out by saying:

“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because YHWH has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of YHWH’s favor.” [Is 61:1-2]

Well, no big deal, right? I mean, after all, we just read those very words. It’s the Old Testament lectionary reading for this Sunday, after all. And that’s just the same sort of thing that happened back in Jesus’ time, also. This was what Jesus was supposed to read, that long-ago Sabbath day. But he didn’t stop there. Luke tells us that after he read the Scripture, he said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I suspect that that wasn’t all Jesus said, because at first everybody was nodding in approval, enjoying listening to Mary’s boy preach, no doubt pleased as punch that the hometown boy had come back to share what he’d learned, maybe pleased, also, that he’d found his calling in life at last. At least that what Luke seems to imply, because at first “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But then the import of what he was actually saying began to sink in. And they were shocked. “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they asked? [Lk 4:22-24]

They were waiting for the Messiah. They had been waiting for hundreds of years. But they didn’t expect the Good News to come wrapped in the all-too-familiar disguise of Mary’s oldest boy, Yeshua bar Joseph, the head-in-the-clouds dreamer who had taken off for parts unknown some years back, leaving his father’s business to his younger brothers.

So they didn’t believe him, and Jesus was angry with them, and they got angry back, and ran him out of town.

Why were the people so upset? Was it just that they couldn’t believe that someone they’d known all their lives was really who God had chosen to save them? Or was there something else going on?

I think there was something deeper at stake here.

You see, the Messiah promises were part of their secret dreams, part of the hopes the people cherished when life got too hard. They could look around at the people around them who ignored the laws of God and prospered anyway, the Romans who sneered at YHWH God and laughed at their claim to be “chosen” people, the tax collectors who called themselves Jews yet preyed on their own people, the rich priests down in Jerusalem who looked down on the Galileans because of their lack of sophistication.

It was a comfort, you see, to believe that “God would get ‘em” someday. Sometimes it was the only comfort they had.

But their hopes had been raised and dashed too many times over the past few hundred years. The Maccabees had come the closest; they had kept Judea independent for almost a hundred years. But it didn’t last, and Egypt and Syria and Rome had each taken their turn stirring the political pot, and the common people just kept getting trampled on. Not a generation before there had been a tax revolt, and well over a hundred Galileans had wound up being executed in the crackdown that followed. And the Zealots, the Sicarii, kept playing around with plots and ambushes and the like that only got the soldiers edgy and prone to assaulting innocent travelers just in case.

No, hope was too fragile a thing to be playing around with. It still is.

Listen again to those words... “YHWH has... sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”

How painful it must be, to be a prisoner waiting for freedom who has been told he’s getting out on a certain date, only to be told at the last minute that it was all a mistake and he has to go back behind bars. How painful it must be, to be told after you’ve come out of the anesthetic after surgery, that it didn’t work, that nothing has changed. How painful it must be, to await a promised legacy and discover that the stocks are worthless and the land is mortgaged. As the book of Proverbs says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” [Pr 13:12]