First
Sunday After Christmas 2013
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Ps
147; Gal 3-4; John 1:1-18
Father Adam Trambley
December 29, 2013,
St. John’s Sharon
This morning we have a beautiful
reading from Isaiah. One way that we can
break into the Old Testament prophecies is by looking at them backwards through
the lens of the life and work of Jesus.
Especially when the church’s lectionary gives us a passage during a
great feast like Christmas, we can usually gain helpful insight by imagining
putting the scripture together with Christ’s saving work.
When we read Isaiah in this way,
one of the things we can do is see Jesus as the speaker. We know that Jesus read these readings, and
one of the gospels even mentions him reading part of the same chapter of Isaiah
aloud in the synagogue and referring it to himself.
We can easily imagine Jesus
praying, I will greatly rejoice in the
LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God.
Many psalms and prayers start with this praise of God, and we know Jesus
prayed, and that when he prayed, he really put some feeling into it. Jesus was so close to his heavenly Father
that he knew just how awesome, how glorious, how loving God is, and his praise
would reflect how intimately he knew and relied on him.
Specifically this morning,
though, we might think about how much Jesus praised God for the miracle of his
being born of a human mother and coming to dwell among us on earth. We often hear about how God loved us so much
that he stooped down to become a human being, and those sentiments ring
true. Scripture talks to us about how
much God loved the world, that he sent his Son to us so that we might have
eternal life. An important part of the
story of the Son of God on earth is his passion and death. All of these considerations, plus parts of
the Bible that talk about Jesus’ obedience to the Father, even unto death, tend
to make us think that the Son of God being born in Bethlehem was a great day
for us, but not so pleasant for God. As
if the Incarnation were like a divine chore that the Almighty had accomplish
because he loved us, akin to cleaning the metaphysical bathroom for the
Christmas guests, even though he would have rather have sat in his Lazy-boy and
watched the Seraphim versus Cherubim in the angelic Quidditch bowl game.
Why would Jesus be praising God
for being born a human being? We can
imagine many reasons. Maybe he liked
hummus—he was born in the Middle East, after all. We know he loved the people he was around,
and maybe he was glad to interact with them as a person. Or maybe there really is something
exhilarating about just being human that sometimes we really do experience,
even if we often forget how wondrously made we truly are. Beyond that, though, Isaiah provides two
specific reasons:
For he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.
What if we think about Jesus
birth in the manger as providing the garments of salvation and the robe of
righteousness to him? We know that
Christ’s human nature was not just a covering over God, but an integral part of
the fully-human and fully-divine natures of the Son of God who was the Second
Person of the Trinity. But keeping that
truth in mind, we can imagine the Jesus’ joy at being born to bring
righteousness and salvation to the world.
Jesus could praise God for the saving work of reconciling humanity back
to God. Jesus’s whole being could exult
in living out an example of righteousness to all people that helped them become
righteous as well. Jesus would not have
been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the incarnational moment, but rather
have enthusiastically embraced the emptying of his divine entitlements to
become a slave so that the earth could be saved. Coming down on Christmas meant that the Son
of God took his eternal attributes of salvation and righteousness and made them
manifest as a particular mission for his time on earth, and the prophet
describes this mission as the clothing God put upon him.
Two aspects of these missionary
robes are revealed as we continue reading that they are worn: as a bridegroom decks himself with a
garland, and as a bride adorns herself with jewels. On the one hand, the salvation and
righteousness Jesus is putting on has a deeply relational component. Instead of coming down from on high, Jesus’
work will have the deeply personal love we find in the best of marriages. Then, too, Jesus’ work with be beautiful,
like jewels or a garland, and it is the crowning work of God in the world. His ministry will resonate with the profound
truths of creation and be recognized as compellingly attractive by men and
women of good-will.
The next lines describe how and
where God’s salvation and righteousness will occur through Jesus. For as
the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to
spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up
before all the nations. Here we have
beautiful image of the organic growth of plants occurring amid every group of people.
If we think about how plants
grow, we recognize a very similar way that God’s salvation and righteousness
have spread throughout the world. We
might prefer it to happen quickly, with the master gardener coming in, pulling
weeds and planting a fully mature tree.
But instead, seeds are sown, and saplings burst through the damp
sod. With protection and care the shoots
continue to thrive over time, eventually ripening enough to yield seeds of
their own that can create other plants.
So much of the work of the church has this slow but determined
character. Attempts at sweeping change are
often ineffective, but personal one-on-one relationships are able to manifest
God’s love to people and transform their lives.
Then that transformed person shares Christ’s love with someone else, and
eventually the slow-starting organic growth becomes like dandelions bedazzling
a green field with thousands of yellow polka-dots. Eventually as righteous and praise spread
out, they go everywhere, even into unexpected places. God’s salvation doesn’t stop at the border,
or, as scripture says, it will spring up
before all nations.
Then hear Jesus reading aloud, For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent and
for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the
dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.
The righteousness and salvation
that Jesus is bringing to his people is supposed to shine forth like the dawn,
like a blazing torch. When people look
at us as God’s Church, they should be blinded by the loving ways we treat each
other, by the ways we care for those around us, and by the goodness that exudes
from how we live our everyday lives. And
until we become this beacon of righteousness and praise, Jesus is not going to
shut up. He wasn’t silent while he was
alive, but was constantly teaching, challenging and healing. Now that he is risen from the dead, seated at
the right hand of the Father he still does not keep silent or rest. He is constantly prays for us, interceding on
our behalf. His Holy Spirit is also at
work, guiding, directing, and emboldening.
Jesus and the Holy Spirit are fully engaged in the ongoing work of his
church as we grow into mature citizens of the Kingdom of God. Restoring us to the fullness of what we were
created to be is the mission of salvation and righteousness that Jesus has put
on through the incarnation, and he isn’t taking off that mission until his work
is finished.
When Christ’s work is done, we
are going to be changed in a noticeable way.
The nations will see your
vindication, and all the kings your glory: and you shall be called by a new
name that the mouth of the LORD will give.
You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal
diadem in the hand of your God.
At Christmas Jesus became like us
so that we could become like him. At the
end of our Isaiah passage this morning, he is telling us how much more we are
going to become. Every people on earth
will notice how much God has transformed us, and our full radiance as men and
women made in the image and likeness of God will overwhelm the most powerful
people on earth. We’ll sparkle more than
the most diamond-studded, gadget-glowing, silk-surrounded sultans and CEO’s
because we will be decked out in the divine bling of the Almighty and people
will be noticing us in all the best ways.
God will see us as an appropriate accessory to his eternal being, so
fabulous in every way will we be. As
someone once said to me, we will be beautiful on the both the outside and the
inside because of what God has done for us in our creation through the Word and
our redemption through Jesus Christ.
Even the names we use for ourselves today won’t be adequate to describe
what we will finally be, so God will give us new ones. This transformation of us and our communities
is what Jesus was born in the world to do, and, especially since he is God, he
is going to keep at it until he finally accomplishes it.
In the meantime, we do our work to
live as children of God and citizens of his Kingdom. We w ith Jesus greatly rejoice in the LORD,
and our whole beings exult in our God because of his salvation and
righteousness toward us.
