those ‘who hear the voice of the servant’). Nation, remnant, individual form a lasting pattern.
As Christians we want to add: Jesus, naturally; and the apostles (Paul often uses Isaianic servant-language to describe his own work). Worryingly, the New Testament also adds: ‘ordinary’ Christians (not that there are any such, but you know what I mean). We can’t get off the hook of the demanding servant-vocation by supposing Jesus has done it all. The Isaianic pattern still awaits fulfilment: if God’s justice and salvation are to reach to earth’s bounds, it will be through servants, equipped with the spirit of the Servant.
This is the basis of Paul’s appeal to Corinth. Before he launches into the letter’s many problems, he lays down a foundation. God’s people in Corinth are summoned to be saints and worshippers (v. 2); great grace has been poured out on them (v. 4); God has given them many gifts of speech and knowledge (vv. 5–7). God is faithful, and will now give them strength (vv. 8–9). They belong to the koinonia the partnership, of God’s Son, King Jesus, the Lord (v. 9).
But that partnership is not just a dining club where one can settle down and enjoy fellowship. It is a business partnership with a purpose: to address the sin and pain of the world with the love of God unveiled on the cross. Paul is about to call the Corinthian church to model and implement the genuine new humanity through which alone God will overturn the wisdom and power of the world. This is the servant-vocation, first-century style. It remains the servant-vocation still.
The fluidity of Isaiah’s servant-concept therefore has nothing to do with the prophet’s being unable to make up his mind or to bring the picture into clear focus. It has to do with God’s continuing determination to work through his created order, through his chosen people. Through Jesus, yes, as the true Israelite, the firstborn of all creation, but also now through those who belong to Jesus; lest, salvation having been accomplished in Jesus, the world and the human race be merely passive thereafter. So, in John’s account of Jesus’ baptism and the first disciples, Andrew’s announcement (‘we’ve found the Messiah!’) is matched, balanced, by Jesus’ comment (‘Simon, eh? I’m going to call you Mr Rock’). When, through the window of God’s revelation, you recognize the unique Servant, you will also glimpse your own reflection in the glass.
The Third Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 9.1–4
1 Corinthians 1.10–18
Matthew 4.12–23
Was Jesus waiting for a signal?
The Gospels agree that he didn’t begin to announce the Kingdom until he heard that John had been arrested. Something about that sinister moment told him that the time had come. He had fought with the powers of darkness, and had overcome. Now one of their earthly representatives had closed in on the Baptist, the one who had prepared the ground for the Kingdom message. Jesus could wait no longer. The darkness had reached its height; it was time for the great light to shine.
The precedents, echoing down the history of Israel, pointed in this direction. Isaiah addressed the problems of his own day by referring back to the Midianite crisis. The enemy power grew stronger, and God saved Israel through an unexpected deliverer. Isaiah’s theme of the coming child (omitted from today’s reading) provides his own equivalent. Whatever threats the powers of darkness may provide, a child will be born through whom God’s zeal will shine the true light in ‘Galilee of the nations’ (then, as in Jesus’ day, Jewish territory permeated with foreign influences). Matthew, invoking Isaiah, draws on this millennium-old tradition in order to say: now at last the story reaches its complete fulfilment.
The very first thing Jesus did, according to Matthew, was to call followers. The beginning of a community, the Kingdom people; the first sign, earlier even than the remarkable healings, that something new was afoot. They left jobs, they left family – both vital symbols of who they were – and became part of that something new, without knowing where it would lead.
This Kingdom people, called into existence by Jesus’ announcement and invitation, grew quickly into the twelve, and has grown from that into a great multitude which no one can number. But it is still the same family, formed by the Kingdom proclamation and its accompanying summons, formed of people who have seen the light shining in the darkness and have chosen to follow the path it illuminates.
It was out of concern for that family that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. We cannot now tell which, if any, of the subsequent problems in the letter were connected to the warring personality cults in the young Church; but the existence of such groups was itself a first-order disaster. Confused and muddled, the Corinthian Christians seem to have lined up Paul, Apollos and Peter with Jesus Christ himself as cult-figures into whose entourage one might be initiated. Paul insists that his role is simply that of the herald, announcing Jesus, the crucified king of the world. That strange message has created a new family out of nothing, a family whose very existence, and particularly whose unity, was supposed to be shining God’s great light into the dark culture around.
As we prepare to celebrate Paul’s own conversion, and to keep the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 1 Corinthians provides a salutary lesson. What are we waiting for? Is the world not dark enough yet?
The Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
1 Kings 17.8–16
1 Corinthians 1.18–31
John 2.1–11
The third day; it would be. John does nothing by accident. New creation bursts in upon a village wedding, itself a sign of hope. Wine is to water as the new world is to the old; bubbling up, taking people by surprise, confounding expectations, raising questions, raising the dead.
Other overtones crowd in too. Jewish purification rites belong with the old creation, but Jesus belongs in the new. ‘Woman, what is there between us? My hour has not yet come’; then, when the hour had truly come, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Jesus’ glory was there already, for those with eyes to see; though they only really acquired such eyes when they saw his glory, crowned as it had been with thorns, on, yes, the third day.
From then on, the challenge was to see that glory in the shame of the cross. The message of the crucified King of the Jews and Lord of the world burst upon an unsuspecting world, not least through Paul’s proclamation, and was a rude shock to the system. Jews were looking for signs of the Kingdom, but what sort of a sign is a crucified King? The pagan world was yearning after wisdom, but what wisdom is there in the stark message that yet another rebel leader has met a messy and untimely end? How can this message contain anything that anyone in their right mind will want to hear? Pour the water into these vessels, though, and then pour it out before the world, and watch it bubble up with transforming power. The gospel, says Paul elsewhere, is God’s saving power, God’s dynamite. Part of its point is precisely that it is, in the world’s eyes, upside down and inside out.
This statement of the gospel’s power to up-end human expectations, set alongside last week’s passage about personality cults among the Corinthian Christians, provides an introduction to the main thrusts of the letter. The Corinthians were eager to turn the rich wine of the gospel back into water again, back into another version of the philosophies they were used to. Paul will have none of it. Unless the stewards at the feast are looking astonished, the party hasn’t really begun. Unless the wrong people are crowding into the kingdom, it isn’t
