Second Sunday in Christmas
Luke 3:1-17
One of the most enduring stock-comic situations in modern fiction and cinema is the spectacle of a family traveling in a car. The father is behind the wheel. The mother – looking slightly harried and worried – is in the front passenger seat; and, three, maybe four, children are crowded into the back. You know how the conversation in this automobile plays out. The children are calling out to the father, “Are we there yet? How much longer until we get there, Daddy?” The parents are either cajoling the children into silence, or barking back at them.
When we are presented with this scene in a film or a story, it is ONLY this scene we get to see. The story-teller does not show us the lengthy passage of time before the children begin hectoring the father about whether or not they have arrived. The REASON we don’t see this is because the story tellers know only too well that WE would have little patience with that sort of thing. It’s enough that we simply note the there is a long, boring passage of time, at least from the perspective of the children in the back seat. The story teller then marks the point where the children begin to lose their patience (as if children had much in the first place).
Now, this kind of situation is nothing new. We have one before us in the two lessons we have heard read a short while ago. The first passage is from Isaiah 61, in one of the sections of Isaiah known to commentators as one of the Servant Songs. These are passages of Hebrew poetry, and the singer is the Servant of the Lord, a messianic figure in latter half of the Book of Isaiah. It was this passage from Isaiah which Jesus read in his home town of Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry. And after he read it, he said to them all, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
This passage in Isaiah is like the announcement of a journey to a destination. But from the time it was announced, from the time that Isaiah penned this song of the coming Servant of the Lord, it was many centuries until Jesus said in that Synagogue service, “We have arrived.” “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, in the history of the Messiah – the many prophecies concerning his coming and his mission – there were long, long, long periods of time between events which moved that history forward in a way that people could see.
There is another example of this kind of thing in the second lesson we heard read. Soon after the Wise men depart, an angel instructs Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt. In the lesson from Luke we heard read a while ago, an angel of the Lord tells Joseph to return to Israel. Let’s stop right there for a moment and note that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus spent at least a couple of years down in Egypt, maybe one or two more. Have you ever heard a meditation or a devotional about those years in Egypt? Imagine how different things must have seemed to Mary and Joseph during those years. First of all, we have angels appearing to Mary and Joseph, then more angels blasting the good news to shepherds when Mary’s son is born. Then these powerful, exotic, and wealthy foreigners from the East arrive with their large caravan and give expensive gifts to the baby, after which they sneak away. And an angel comes yet again to tell Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt.
And, then what? Well, nothing! For two years, maybe three or four years. Nothing. I don’t know what they did during those years in Egypt, but whatever it was, it certainly must have felt anticlimactic. Before the angel tells Joseph to return to Israel, I’m quite sure Mary and Joseph were wondering how long they were going to be cooling their heels in Egypt.
But, the day finally came, and the angel directed their steps to a city in Galilee called Nazareth. The very next words in Matthew’s Gospel read like this: 1In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea 2and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Did you notice what was NOT mentioned? How long a time is there between Joseph’s resettling in Nazareth and the beginning John the Baptist’s ministry? How about 30 years or so? Nothing is said about those in Matthew, or Mark, or John. Luke shows us one episode from Jesus’ boyhood, when his family went to Jerusalem for the Passover. But, other than that, those 30 years are blank in the Scriptural record.
It’s natural and understandable that the earliest Christians were fascinated with those years, and many tried to fill in the blanks with all sorts of fantastic stories and legends about the boy Jesus and the miracles he was performing even as a young boy. Someday when we all get to heaven, I suppose we’ll know the truth about those 30 years in Nazareth, and the two or more years in Egypt before them. And, we finally learn what those years contained, we’ll agree that the evangelists, when writing their gospels, did the same thing as the screen writers who showed us that scene in the car, with the kids saying “are we there yet?” In both cases, there were long periods of time when nothing very remarkable happens, or when a whole lot of things are happening – year in and year out – and none of it is worth noting in a history book.
It is, however, worthwhile for US to take note of these blank spots, and to understand their significance. These periods of time during which nothing especially remarkable happens are far more common, certainly they occupy much, much more of our own lifetimes, than those short, brief periods when something in our life is like a hinge on which the whole story of our life turns. Indeed, in the life of Jesus himself, those climactic final three years of his life rested squarely on the 30-odd years which preceded them.
And, though we are not shown the content of those 30-odd years, we must never forget that they were necessary for several reasons.
Those ordinary years were necessary for Jesus to experience so that he could fulfill his mission of being God with us. So often, we think of the incarnation in purely metaphysical terms. We understand the incarnation to mean that the eternal, uncreated God became united with his own creation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom we find undiminished deity and true humanity, united without confusion in one person forever. That IDEA is all about metaphysics – the “whatness” of the incarnation, if you will. But, the author of Hebrews says this about Jesus: “Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”
Here’s an astounding idea that I’ll bet you never thought of before – we think Jesus is a suitable high priest because of his sinlessness. And that is true. But his suitability as our high priest requires more than just sinlessness. Hebrews tells us that it requires that he be made like us in all things. And in the gospel lesson for today we see what one of those things is – a healthy chunk of your life doing ordinary things, living an ordinary life, when nothing particularly remarkable happens.
Now, when I say nothing remarkable is happening, I don’t mean that nothing at all is happening (thought that’s how it may feel to us at the time). Remember when you were a kid in the back seat, pestering Daddy about when you were going to arrive. From where you sat, nothing much was happening. But, of course, everything was happening. In fact, exactly those thing were happening that were REQUIRED before you reached your destination. Again, the author of Hebrews points to these years in Jesus life – when nothing particularly unusual was happening – but in spite of that, the things which WERE happening were exactly those things which were REQUIRED to happen if Jesus was to fulfill his mission. Speaking of Jesus, the author of Hebrews writes,
… in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, 8though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.
Jesus had to learn obedience, because that’s how we become obedient – we learn it. Jesus suffered many things before that final suffering on the cross, because that’s what our life is full of – trials, temptations, testings that are not fun or pleasant or enjoyable, sufferings if you will, through which we are perfected – that we are flawless, but rather we become seasoned, matured, and fit for that thing which God wishes to accomplish in us and through us. And, so also with Jesus. 9And having been perfected,” the author of Hebrews write, “He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.” (Heb 5)
Last night I was at a New Year’s dinner with the Rosewells. It’s something Barbara and I have been doing with them since the early 1990s. The last several years we’ve had some fun with making predictions about the future of the coming year. We take pen and paper, and we write down what we think will happen in the next twelve months. We make predictions for ourselves, for one another, for national and international affairs, and then we add a category we’ve called pot pourri – where we make predictions about ANY thing we find interesting.
Last night we opened and read the predictions we had made just twelve months earlier. Once in a very great while someone scored a bull’s eye. Barbara, for example, predicted the Red Sox would win the World Series. But except for those very rare and improbable successes, most of our predictions fell into two kinds:
(1) predictions which were flatly wrong, completely off-base, and in hind sight a little wacky.
(2) And, then, there were predictions which while they were wrong – because they never happened in 2004 – they were still predictions that looked like they could be fulfilled in the next year. We jokingly suggested to one another that our crystal balls were just TUNED a year too early.
After reading those predictions and having some good fun with our failures, we took up pen and paper again and wrote out our predictions for the year 2005. As I sat at the Rosewell’s dining table, pondering what to put down, today’s gospel reading tended to keep me from writing too much in too much detail. What is true about this coming year is that it is very likely to resemble the year just past, and that whatever the coming year the vast majority of it will contain very ordinary things.
That, my friends, is just fine. Jesus has been there and done that too. Ninety-percent of Jesus’ earthly life was spent in the Galilean equivalent of Waxahachie, Texas. And while he was there, he spent his days as ordinary people in Nazareth did – taking one day at a time, doing what their hands found to do, working, relating to family and neighbors, worshipping in the synagogue. And, this went on year, after year, after year.
I don’t know if there will be momentous things for us as a parish or for you as individuals this year. Even if there are momentous things, they will be set in a multitude of days just like today – characterized by nothing especially remarkable. But as those days pass by one after another, remember this: it was those days, and all their multitude, that formed and shaped and matured and seasoned the Savior of the World. And, because we are in Him, whatever else we are called to do, we are called to walk as he walked, through those multitude of ordinary days, because it is in them that we will be conformed to the image of Christ.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
