We are in
that time between. It is a time of
joy. The joy of knowing God has come,
God is with us. It is a time of enlightenment. We have seen and heard of God
come as the human Jesus of Nazareth. My message for us to day is a simple one. Fully
entering Our enlightenment, our joy, is accepting and acting on Jesus’
invitation to “Come and see”. But there
is great deal to unpack in this simple invitation.
We have a
related difficulty. After the coming of God in human flesh, we struggle to live
by the light and the path revealed to us by this light. The story we have walked through, god born of
Mary like any other human being, god vulnerable to the machinations of Herod,
god coming to the banks of the Jordan as just a normal unremarkable person.
According to our passage in john even after the baptism and the heaven opening
and the voice and the manifestation of the Spirit like a dove, John still
points out Jesus to his own disciples and says hey, you might want to check
that guy out, he’s the Lamb of God, and even so still others stick around John
rather than going after Jesus.
We have in
all of this the mystery of the Church, the body of Christ in continuity with
Israel, not so as to supplant the importance nor the reality of the Jewish
people as God’s chosen people. The church is Israel taken up into Jesus of
Nazareth, who fulfilled what Israel is, Christ fulfils the law. Also, the
church is how the prophesies of the nations coming to Israel and being
enlightened is also fulfilled. In this small community, we have this reality
encapsulated, we have a member who is Jewish and who knows Christ come in the
flesh and we have those who come from a variety of peoples in the world all of
whom are blessed by Israel and the Jewish people, having been enlightened by
Jesus of Nazareth the word of god Made flesh, the Israel and wisdom of God.
Our moment
comes after a long and varied history of the church in which those who call
upon the name of the Lord Jesus, Christ have missed or not answered, or
ignored, or betrayed the call to be the church. We Christians have relied on
that which is other than Jesus Christ.
There is a
need to reacquaint ourselves as members of Christ body with the place of God’s
presence in our midst. We need to be reminded that when God came in human flesh
God did not reside at the centers of power. We need to contemplate and discern
the meaning that God coming in our midst
and the manifestations around it, were missed by most everyone especially the
powerful. The power brokers and well as the powerful had no idea that anything
significant had happened. Even many of
the poor and the oppressed people in Judea and Galilee also had no clue.
We may
wonder what to do in this moment. We may wonder at the failures of members of the church to live
out our faith, and to live into the call to be saints, as body of Christ, isn’t
so much that we haven’t known what it is, as we the members of the body of
Christ have consistently tried to dilute the call and the message by realism or
by acquiescence to the powerful. We know it. We celebrate it year after
year. We know the teaching and we will
in this liturgy read the sermon on the mount and have the teaching of Jesus
clearly proclaimed to us positions other
Christians take. But we can’t get mired in the failures of Christians and the
betrayals of Christ and the Church, either now or in the past. We need to come
again and ask Jesus Christ to show he is staying. And we need to leave aside our assumptions
and presuppositions and truly come and see.
The Isiah
passage we read reminds us that what we have been liturgically waiting for in
Advent and Celebrating in Christmas and continue to celebrate in this season
after the Epiphany, was proclaimed and anticipated by the Hebrew Prophets. We
know well with Isaiah that the world can be a place absent of light and
hope. What we need to remember and see
again that it is God who enlightens and offers hope, that the nations and the
powers aren’t the means through which God offers this hope and light. This
happens through a small and insignificant people on the world stage, the Jewish
people that God chose to bring enlightenment and hope. Ultimately accomplished through
the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, Isaiah has only a small glimpse of this,
and much of what he says of this one and what will happen either is wrong or at
least not literal. That is, we don’t know what we celebrate about the person
Jesus of Nazareth merely because Isaiah and the prophets of Israel proclaimed
it. Rather after the coming of Christ, the incarnation of the Word of God, we
see what the Hebrew prophets saw and yet couldn’t fully articulate. We as often
as not are like those around John the Baptist , not seeing , nor recognizing
the reality of God with us.
