Isaiah 35:1-10

If you have been reading my earlier entries on Isaiah, you know to look in the surrounding chapters for context. What you will find is death and destruction, what the "Great Agnositc" Robert Ingersoll called the "ravings against kings and nations". The lectionary delivers the scattered bits of hope throughout. But should we discard the book because of the violent parts? Or should we try to imagine the world where a small tribe was trying to do right, but they were getting slaughtered. Easy for us, with our military might and police forces with assualt weapons to say how horrible God acts in the Old Testament. They fight with Egypt, then are attacked by Assyrians, then exiled by the Babylonians. When the Babylonians released them, there was no nation building, no Marshall Plan. They returned to the ruins of their kingdom and clung to nothing but hope for a better tomorrow.

Even in these passages about everlasting joy and flowers in the desert, a little smiting creeps in. In verse 4, "He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense." We would like to think that evil can be dealt with using reason. We see diplomatic efforts and UN peace keepers and think we are civilized. Then someone from our home town dies in a fire fight, or a cruise missile goes astray of its military target, and for a little while, the horrible things that are being done in our name seem all too close. This is probably not the Christmas sermon you had in mind.

Luke 1:46b-55

This is referred to as "Mary's Song" or "The Magnificat". A good reader will read it as a poem. Mary is just a slave girl, but she is becoming the bearer of the new message. This is a bit of Luke in our Advent focusing on Matthew, so we get the mighty being brought down, the hungry being filled. It would have been a better story if those things had actually happened but, like I did with Isaiah above, I'm not going to throw this poem out just for that. If we look at Christian nations today, some of them are the richest nations on earth. Some of them did figure out how to give more power to their people and to get rid of thrones. Some of them are working on feeding the hungry although there are many lessons yet to learn.

Has all of this mercy been done from generation to generation, out of fear? Has it been done solely for one nation and for people of certain ancestry? Some would say so, but I think they have a hard case to make. Those things are done by non-Christians for a variety of reasons on a regular basis. Just as often, proclamations like this, of the social order being overturned, get twisted. The male priests turn Mary back into a submissive woman. Do we throw out the song of hope because some guys screwed it up? Or do we do like John the Baptist from last week and reclaim the high ground?

Matthew 11:2-11

The parrallel shown here is Jesus claiming that the things Isaiah predicted are actually happening. This is standard literary technique. Matthew will later portray Jesus as a new Moses. Matthew also deals with the questions of belief, even John the Baptist, the one who is a messenger coming before the Messiah, is having doubts. This is a reflection of the entire Israelite nation having trouble accepting the idea. Matthew was written sometime around AD 80 and gentiles were accepting the idea of Jesus more than Jews.

The final verse, about the least being greater is somewhat of a turn to this passage, but it fits with the overall theme, or at least one of them. It's one of the things I think the New Testament does well, always remembering the "least". Other moral systems and philosophies also acknowledge them, but usually not as explicitly. The idea of a social contract says those who benefit greatly from the advantages they were given have an obligation to ensure others have those same advantages. No one actually pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. No one is "self-made". If you break the contract and only take without giving, those you take from are no longer bound by the contract. That's when revolutions happen. These 1st century Jews attempted a peaceful version of that revolution. They were partially successful, and we can learn from that.