Titus 3:4-7
Since many churches, perhaps most, have multiple services at Christmas, the Lectionary provides no fewer than three sets of readings – though the same set of readings is used in each year of the 3-year cycle. All three lists forge a connection between the prophet Isaiah and the birth of Jesus.
This connection is crucial to understanding the significance of that birth, as the Epistle readings extracted from Hebrews and Titus make clear. Thanks to modern scholarship, however, we now know something that the authors of those epistles did not know. The Book of Isaiah is really three books. Moreover, the authors of these three books (Chaps 1-39, 40-55 and 56-66) lived and wrote several hundred years apart – before, during and after the traumatic capture and exile of the Jew in Babylon.
The editing of these materials into “one” book is no accident. Whoever its editors were, they correctly perceived that the same spirit, and in large part the same theme, animates them all – how to have a faith that endures. This is what makes it possible for the Old Testament readings for Christmas to make a selection from all three. And this fact carries an important lesson for us. When John the Baptist asks Jesus if he is ‘the one who is to come’, he is making reference to a hope and a yearning that has persisted over a very long period of time, and across dramatically changing fortunes. We should take this timescale to heart.
“A thousand ages in Thy sight, are but an evening gone” Isaac Watts reminds us in his paraphrase of Psalm 90. It is easy for us to confine the advent of the Messiah to the deeply intriguing and appealing, but brief, event that is the Nativity. God’s saving work in his Messiah certainly began at Christmas, but the birth of Jesus was dimly recognized for what it was only thirty years later, after his death and Resurrection. And its full significance lies within the immensely vaster time scale of God’s redeeming history.
The key spiritual task at Christmas is to find a way of acknowledging that in Jesus God came to an earthly home, without at the same domesticating him. The deep innocence of Jesus that makes our redemption possible, is not that of a sweet little baby. “He came and dwelt among us” so that, for all our follies and weaknesses, we might be raised to God’s level, not that God might be reduced to ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment