Antipas, another son, will appear soon enough. Matthew’s story reminds us vividly that the good news of God’s personal redeeming activity had from the first to make its way in the disorderly and dangerous real world of violence and conspiracy.
This is exactly the point made by Hebrews. These readings nullify any Christmas sentimentality, and insist that, from the first, Jesus embodied the living, saving God, personally present with his people. Like us in every respect, suffering and being tempted, he is able to help. That’s another contrast between the true God and the idols; they are able to thrill, but they can’t help. They can excite, but they can’t rescue. There is only one God who can. To believe in the incarnation is not to perform a mental conjuring trick, but to swear allegiance to the God who had always acted like that, whose love would be satisfied with nothing less.
The Second Sunday of Christmas
Jeremiah 31.7–14
Ephesians 1.3–14
John 1.1–18
C. S. Lewis said that it sometimes seemed an anticlimax to move from the broad poetic sweep of the Old Testament to the narrow focus and seemingly mundane concern of the New. No chance of that this week; but the readings show well enough why the problem occurs.
Early Christian writers were faced with a towering challenge. They believed that the events concerning Jesus were the fulfilment, the filling-full-ment, of the long and winding story of Israel. The hopes and fears, the laughter and tears, of all the years of Israel’s story, and the world’s story, met together in Jesus in Bethlehem, Galilee, Jerusalem, Calvary, the empty tomb. How can you write that into story after story? How can you say, and get your readers to take it in, that this birth, this death, this new life, were the reality towards which the prophetic signposts all pointed?
One obvious answer is more poetry; and that, in a sense, is what both Paul and John offer here. The Ephesians passage is a sweeping retelling of Israel’s story: God’s choice of his people, the redemption from Egypt, the unveiling of God’s wider purpose, the revealing of his will, and the personal presence of God as his people journey to the land of promise. Only it has all happened fully and finally – in Jesus the Messiah. Try reading the passage with the emphasis on ‘him’ each time, to bring out the surprise: it is in him that all this has happened, not in some other Jewish moment or movement, not in the rule of Caesar or any other feature of world history. The story is familiar, the hero unexpected. Open your ears, says Paul, and hear how the songs of the prophets have at last come round into the major key. Learn to listen for the echoes. Watch the picture come up in three dimensions, or maybe even more.
John 1 suffers from carol-service repetition. It becomes audible wallpaper: the headmaster’s drone tells the school only that it’s nearly time for mince pies. Almost worse: it is usually cut off at v. 14, producing the literary and theological equivalent of leaving the spire off a cathedral.
Try taking one image and seeing the whole Johannine poem reflected in it. In the beginning … You are standing in the dark looking eastwards out to sea. The stars flicker overhead. The first signs of light, and of life: grey pre-dawn sky, seabirds around the breaking waves. Grey turns to green, then gold. Curtains still closed inshore, oblivious to the wakening glory. Stars fade, sea and sky catch fire, and the bright, overpowering disk emerges. Too radiant to look at, but in its light you can see everything else. The heavens declare God’s glory, new every morning: was Psalm 19, along with Genesis 1 and Exodus 32—34, among the many passages in John’s mind?
New Year resolution: read the New Testament while the Old is still echoing around the mind’s rafters.
The First Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 42.1–9
Acts 10.34–43
Matthew 3.13–17
John’s baptism can easily seem a mere introduction, the soon-to-be-forgotten starting point. The early Church clearly didn’t see it like that, since John continues to haunt the story in all four Gospels and Acts. This wasn’t just surreptitious polemic against John’s continuing followers. It was positive: John was the heaven-sent prophet through whom the Messiah was to be revealed. Mentioning him reinforces Jesus’ messiahship.
This is particularly striking in the Cornelius story. Peter, speaking to a Gentile, makes no attempt to de-Judaize his message. It is essentially a messianic statement, as indeed the title ‘Jesus Christ’ in v. 36 indicates: Jesus is the anointed one, whose works of healing were the signs that ‘God was with him’ (a phrase used of David among others). The resurrection demonstrates that Jesus’ death was messianic, despite appearances; and now this Jesus is to be judge of living and dead, the dispenser of divine forgiveness. All of this sustains the claim that Jesus, the Messiah, is Lord of all the world – a title which, as Cornelius would recognize, was claimed by his own boss. There lies the true challenge to the non-Jew: to see the Jewish king as the world’s true Lord.
The story of Jesus’ baptism in Matthew’s Gospel, therefore, is both a further challenge to Herod – here is God anointing his true king under the nose of the old one, somewhat like Samuel anointing David with Saul still on the throne – and the beginning of the confrontation with, as well as the welcome for, the whole world. It explains why the foreign kings (if that’s what they were) brought him gifts. It explains why another centurion, in Matthew 8, knows that he possesses authority. If he is the anointed Messiah, he is Lord of all. The mere announcement of this messiahship, as Acts 10 bears witness, is the thing that carries the power of the Spirit. It declares that Israel’s God has brought his people’s long story to its strange moment of truth. The whole world is now to be addressed by the one who is both Israel’s representative and God’s own son (‘Son of God’ is a messianic title before it is a trinitarian one).
But the large agenda set before the servant-Messiah in Isaiah 42 is accomplished only by implication in the Gospels. Matthew clearly believed that Jesus fulfilled Isaiah 42, and that his death was the primary achievement of the task there set out. But if he knew in his day that the good news still needed to be carried to all the nations, would he not say in ours too that ‘the coastlands [still] wait for his teaching’ (42.4)? If it is true that the Messiah will not faint or be discouraged until he has established justice in the earth, how is that steady, tireless programme to be implemented by those who, today, claim to be anointed by his own royal Spirit to proclaim him as Lord of all?
The Second Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 49.1–7
1 Corinthians 1.1–9
John 1.29–42
Our question to Isaiah is always, ‘Who is the Servant?’ Israel, replies the prophet (Isaiah 49.3). But the far harder question is, ‘Who is Israel?’
To this, Isaiah gives three concentric answers. The nation as a whole, the people abhorred by the nations (v. 7). Those whose task it is to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore
