advent 2 Year B

Malachi 3: 1-4 NRSV text
Luke 1: 68-79 NRSV text
Luke 3: 1-6 NRSV text

When really important men are doing really important things and making decisions that will affect the lives of countless numbers of people, the word of God comes to John in the wilderness. Don’t you just love that? Luke is deliciously ironic. As a historian, he begins this section as any good historian should – creating the context by identifying the public figures – the shakers and movers – who are themselves the creators of the wider context for the events he reports. But then, with arch understatement, he says, “But the really important things – things that have to do with the actions and presence of the Creator – are happening somewhere else entirely!”

An imminent turf war
Tiberius is the emperor; Pilate is the governor; Herod, Philip and Lysanias are rulers; Annas and Caiaphas are high priests. These are the people who hold sway over the region that is the setting for Luke’s narrative of Jesus. They are the wielders of power. This is the way that the world “works”. The inhabited world is divided into territories, defined by borders, defended by soldiers and ruled over. It is boundaried – not only geographically, but by the scope and limitations of power. Tiberius exercises power over everyone in the Empire. Pilate is answerable to Tiberius, but exercises power over the province of Judea. Herod, Philip and Lysanias exercise limited power over the people under them, but are answerable to those above them. The context is “turf war”; the challenge is to keep the peace. And that’s how it is with the kingdoms of the world.

This is the calm before the storm. It is indeed the context for what is about to unfold in the story of Jesus. But the story that it heralds is a shocking, unimagined one. A turf war is about to erupt. What Luke is telling us is that these are the kingdoms whose sell-by date has just expired! Their time is over; their trappings and appearances of power are hollow and empty. A new king has already been born. His name is Jesus. A new kingdom is about to burst on to the world scene. “He will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1: 32-3).

The Emperor claims to be the Son of God. Annas and Caiaphas believe that they are spiritual rulers in a temple state. Yet God’s kingdom is something else entirely. It is ranged against these kingdoms and their pretensions to deity. Its king is the Son of God – Jesus. Note how (with the exception of Lysanias) the people mentioned in 3: 1-2 all feature in the unfolding gospel story as opponents of Jesus. Jesus will be taken before Pontius Pilate on the orders of the high priest, and will be accused of sedition against the Emperor. The stage is set for the confrontation between the kingdoms. God is establishing God’s kingdom. Its story is beginning – not in the marked out territories of these rulers, but in “no-man’s land” – in the wilderness.

The wilderness (cf Luke 1: 68-79/Malachi 3: 1-4)
“…the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness” (3:2b). The wilderness is God’s territory – not because it is unclaimed, but because it is untamed. It is God’s space. The wilderness is the refuge of brigands, but also of revolutionaries. Those who wanted to muster a resistance army retreated to the desert to gather strength and plan sedition. It was synonymous with threat to the established powers. “The wilderness” was politically loaded.

More than that, though, the wilderness is the place where people meet God. God met Moses in the wilderness. The wilderness was where the Hebrew slaves found refuge from Pharaoh; where they met Yahweh and came to be a people. Time and again God meets people in the wilderness, or takes them there. It is a proving ground – a refining place. It is the place where mystics go and where godly communities are established (eg Qumran). Significantly, it is the place where the herald of the Messiah shall come from: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight!’” (3:4).

The word of God comes to John. We already know that John is destined to be the prophet of God’s salvation (cf 1:68-79). He will be filled with the spirit and power of Elijah (1:17). John is the prophet of the Most High, who will prepare the way of the Lord and give God’s people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins (1:76-7). All of this is the fulfilment of the promises of old (1: 70-75; cf Malachi 3: 1-4). The word of God spurs John to act; to begin his ministry. John comes, baptising people for forgiveness of their sins and “calling out” in the wilderness.

“Keeping the dream alive” – the role of the prophets
We will focus on John next week. For now, we need to note that Luke portrays John as the Elijah figure – the last of the Old Testament prophets whose coming heralds the “great and terrible Day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5; cf Luke 1: 17). It is the prophetic tradition that is our focus on this second Sunday in Advent.

The prophets are central to the Covenant. They are the ones who recall the people to God’s covenant purposes in electing the people of Israel. Zechariah’s prophecy in Luke 1: 68-78 is a summary of Israel’s “salvation history”. Yahweh made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (the Patriarchs, or “ancestors” of 1:72-3). When their Hebrew descendants are slaves in the brick pits of Pharaoh, Yahweh raises up Moses (the first and greatest of the prophets) to lead them to freedom and to make them Yahweh’s own people.

This is an act of mercy. God’s intention is as it had been right from the beginning with Abraham: to bless all the nations of the earth. Unlike the other deities of the Ancient Near East, Yahweh is no tribal deity, whose job is to prosecute the interests of his own, small, select band of people at the expense of others. Yahweh is Lord of the universe – the God to whom all created reality owes its existence. Not only is the scope of God’s sovereignty cosmological, but so is the scope of God’s saving love! The prehistory of Genesis is the story of Yahweh’s determination to save creation – in spite of human sin.

Sin is always “political”, in the sense that it takes concrete expression (is “incarnated”) in the structures of society. Human beings create society so that only some flourish – at the expense of others. God’s intention is for life for all. And so Yahweh’s defining act of salvation in the Old Testament is the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from the death-system of slavery. Yahweh “hears their groans” and acts to save them. The deliverance cycle in Exodus ends with the freed slaves looking at the dead Egyptians on the sea shore (Exodus 14:30). The Exodus event is a paradigm for Yahweh’s purposes in the world: liberation from all that enslaves, dehumanises and destroys. It is paradigmatic and programmatic in the same way that the resurrection of Jesus ushers in a new creation. It is more than the “Great Escape” of a few fortunate slaves: it is the enactment of a promise for all humankind.

Yahweh always intends that the establishment of the Israelite state is to be a living sign of the mercy and salvation of God. It is to be a kingdom – but one that reflects the character of its true King, Yahweh. Because Yahweh has freed the slaves from the misery of oppression, there is to be no slavery and oppression in Israel. Israel is to be different from the other nations.

But Israel doesn’t want to be different! The people demand a king “like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). The establishment of the monarchy is the problem in Israel’s history with Yahweh. It is essentially an act of faithlessness – of rejection of Yahweh as King (1 Samuel 8:7). From being a tribal confederacy, Israel becomes a monarch state. Yahweh allows this to happen, but at great cost. In becoming “like other nations”, Israel loses something radically important to its distinctiveness as a sign of Yahweh’s character and purposes. As it becomes an established power in the region, the people forget that Yahweh is not a tribal deity. Yahweh becomes subject to the demands of empire instead of Lord. The cult of the temple becomes the guarantee and legitimation of Israel’s political ambitions, instead of a constant reminder of Yahweh’s mercy and lordship. The nation that began life as liberated slaves becomes a slave-owning society. The nation that owes its existence to the liberating mercy of Yahweh convinces itself that Yahweh chose it because of its merits.

Here, then, is the key to the role of the prophets. They are the ones with direct access to Yahweh’s counsel. As such, they are the living voice of the living God that cuts through the ideological chains of empire, calling and recalling Israel (and Judah) to covenant faithfulness.

The prophets announce Yahweh’s judgment on oppression. They call for justice for the least and freedom for those in chains. They remind the rulers that their job is to rule as vice-regents of Yahweh, rather than as absolute monarchs. The job of the monarch is the flourishing of the people – not the other way around. The prophets keep Yahweh’s dream alive. And their test case is always what is happening to the very least in society – because that is Yahweh’s test case.

The wilderness – God on the margins
We need to note one more factor about the wilderness. It is a place on the margins – geographically, socially and politically. Jerusalem is the centre of it all. It is where the temple is – where God is believed to be present. It is where affairs of state take place.

Yet Luke’s Christmas story emphasises time and again that God is at work on the margins. Jesus will be born in Bethlehem – a godforsaken little village of no importance whatever, other than that it was remembered as the birth place of David. Yet that is unimportant, because Jerusalem is David’s city! David himself never laid any importance on his home town, and neither did anyone else.

Ironically, the city of Jerusalem will become the centre of it all – but the centre of resistance to Jesus. It is the city that “stones the prophets and kills those that are sent to her”. God’s kingdom is centred not on what is happening at the seat of power, but on what is happening in the wilderness and on the margins. Whatever is happening in Rome and Jerusalem pales into insignificance against what God is doing in obscure places among unimportant and despised people.

The people are waiting for Israel to be freed from Roman rule, for the temple state to be re-established and for Israel to be restored to glory under a Davidic monarch. They are looking, in other words, for a re-run of the disastrous choices they made when they wanted to be “like all the other nations”, instead of a sign of God’s rule and will for the world.

What God is doing in Jesus is far, far more than they can possibly imagine. It is the establishment of God’s kingdom – the kingdom in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first; in which all shall live and flourish because the very least live and flourish first. This is the “blessing of all the nations of the earth” – the promise made to Abraham and the dream that has been kept alive by the prophets for all these years.

Amen.

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