Malachi 3:1-7; Luke 3:1-6
December 6, 2009: Second Sunday of Advent
For obvious reasons our lectionary couples the New Testament Advent texts with messianic prophetic texts from the Old Testament. But we should be cautious in how we understand the relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament. It’s obvious that the New Testament wants to bear witness to who Jesus was and what his life, death and resurrection meant. However, even though it seems the Old Testament passages point so obviously to John and Jesus, the use of these passages by Christians during the Advent season does not establish that Jesus alone fulfills the Old Testament prophesies.
Instead, we know that these prophetic readings have served many people throughout history – including people of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. They have helped people connect the newness and hope of their day to the promises God made through the mouths of the prophets so long ago. There is something reassuring in believing that what God promised in these texts does connect to our lives today. It means we can trust in God, in the promises, in the scriptures.
This is true for Christians who believe Jesus was the Messiah God promised. It is true for Jews who see God’s promises fulfilled not in Jesus but rather in the continued hope for a Messiah…in God’s constancy and unchanging message of justice for the poor and outcast. It’s true for Muslims who see the prophets pointing through Jesus to Mohammad. In fact, these texts speak hope again and again into our world, regardless of our particular faith.
We can even see that the prophets in the Old Testament generated different understandings of Jesus as Messiah in our gospels. The prophets offer differing ideas of what kind of person the messenger and Jesus would be, and so people who lived during and after Jesus’ life had to choose which vision from the Old Testament they thought best interpreted the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus.
This all might seem like a pointless digression. But there are two reasons this “digression” is important to our task in Advent. First, if we can start to identify which prophets influenced our gospel writers, we can peel back a layer, so to speak, and discern what is an interpretation by them and what is closer to the original events and stories of Jesus.
Second – and arguably more important – we need to acknowledge that we do exactly the same thing as our gospel writers! We look back to scripture and choose particular parts and passages in order to understand who Jesus is to us today. When there are differing understandings of Jesus between the writers of our scriptures, we have to choose, and we do, whether consciously or not. And that’s okay…if we are conscious we are doing it and as long as our search and decisions are as grounded and genuine and faithful as those of the gospel writers. I trust in that process we will grow more and more aware of who Jesus was and is, and so grow in our faith.
This morning, we have Malachi and John the Baptist. Each reveal their understanding of what was going to happen once the Messiah came:
Malachi prophesied during the post-exilic period. This was when the people were returning from Babylon to Jerusalem, the temple was being rebuilt, and at first there was great hope among the Israelites. But these hopes were soon dashed. The priesthood – the religious authorities to whom the people looked for guidance – had lost their way. They engaged in practices that violated the laws governing ritual sacrifice and they failed to teach the people what it meant to live in covenant with Yahweh. The widows and orphans, and all those the torah demands the people of Yahweh to protect, were suffering under oppression and neglect. And the ones who supposedly knew God and what God expected were doing nothing about it.
Into this setting Malachi promises a messenger will come to remind the people of the covenant. This reminder will come as a shock to the ones who have lost their way, and the message will be painful. However, through this messenger God will draw near and draw the people back into a covenant relationship with God. The problem for the people was that being in a covenant relationship with God was hard – very difficult. The demands of the Torah were hard enough. But faced with so much corruption and suffering they must have wondered whether it would make any difference – whether it was worth the effort.
John the Baptist most likely drew on many prophets as he tried to understand his own role in the coming of the Messiah and who exactly that Messiah would be. When John lived, there were a number of popular messianic movements in which the people were excited by the prospect of an immediate change in the world order. After living under the weight of the Roman Empire, there was much hope in the coming of a Messiah to bring the Empire down and establish a kingdom ruled by this Messiah. Often the leaders of these messianic movements would go off into the desert, and people would follow hoping to hasten this messianic event.
John the Baptist led one such popular movement. While each gospel has a different portrait of John, all of the gospels locate hin in the desert with a following of people being baptized and repenting, announcing that the Messiah was coming soon. This would initiate a violent “cleanup” of the world in which those who had abandoned God’s ways and oppressed God’s people would be met with severe judgment. For John, Jesus was this Messiah.
Having a sense of how Malachi and John saw the Messiah, we can ask how does this affect what they believe should be done in the present? Malachi asks this very question in his text. God says to the people, “return to me, and I will return to you.” And the people ask: “How shall we return?” They seemed eager to know, but the people were cynical. Many looked around and decided morality was of no consequence since evildoers went unpunished.
Although God was calling them to return to relationship with God right then, their hope turned from present possibilities to a dramatic event in the future where God, not they, would take care of the evildoers. In the apocalypse, which was coming soon, God’s justice would be direct and felt deeply. This is similar to the eschatology of John the Baptist. This ethic is not about changing the world; it is about changing oneself in order to avoid the impending, violent judgment of God.
But now we need to ask whether Jesus is the Messiah for which Malachi and John were preparing? In other words, are they “right” about how God would come into our world? This answer is complicated…it’s both “yes” and “no”. In many ways Jesus fit the Messiah role imagined by Malachi and John. He was God incarnate, and his coming did cause people to take notice and he did initiate a new world order, called “the Realm of God”. But he turned out to be a very different Messiah than many imagined; including Malachi and John. We can appreciate the realities Malachi and John faced, and can draw on their hope for something different, but ultimately we depart from their final vision of what that meant for what the people should do in the meantime.
Clearly suffering continues even after Jesus lived and ministered. Jesus’ way of nonviolence did not deter the authorities from killing him, ending his ministry and any hopes on the part of his followers that he would end their suffering once and for all. And so one possible response to persistent suffering would be to decide that Jesus’ way didn’t work. Maybe violence must be met with violence if it is to be defeated.
Another response is to conclude that evil is inevitable and all that is left for us to do is to retreat from the world and ready ourselves for God’s coming judgment, a la John and his followers. And like the people to whom Malachi speaks, we too are tempted to believe that the demanding ethics of Jesus are of no consequence, since it does nothing to change the fact that often evil goes unpunished.
However, as I said earlier, there is a distinct possibility people like Malachi and John had it wrong; at least in part. And so when faced with suffering there is a third option for us other than resignation or retreat. In fact, Luke can be of some help here. He rejects these two options. Instead he believed the early Christians were to live guided by the life and ethics of Jesus, which would build God’s realm here and now. He eventually lets go of the violent, judgmental scenes and focuses on the present. Luke believed that was precisely what Jesus – this new kind of Messiah – did himself. Rather than drawing on prophets like Malachi, Luke looks to Isaiah. Isaiah saw a future where the world would be set right, but he saw this as happening by engaging the present realities.
Think about how Luke begins this passage. This seemingly boring list of names that poor Ed had to read actually has great significance. Luke sets the announcement of Jesus’ coming squarely in the middle of the social and political world of his day. He lists all the rulers and elite priests as a way of setting the stage for Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is born into a world of every day events, of emperors, governors, kings and high priests, of taxation and censuses. Far from preaching that “the end” was near, Jesus life was about transforming this present reality.
All three options are available to us as well. We could fight violence with violence, embracing Empire ethics, believing that we are on the right side and our violence is righteous and will bring about good and peace: an ethic, as we talked about last week, called “the ends justifies the means.” Or we could retreat from the world believing suffering, corruption, and oppression are inevitable. We could go ready ourselves for the end times, and just make sure that we will be on God’s favored list…to hell with everyone else, literally. Of course, as we know “to not act is to act.” All the evil in this world would have our tacit approval because we are not working to address the brokenness and suffering caused by the evils of this world.
Instead, we must choose Luke’s third way. This means that through how we live now, addressing the real issues of our day, we bring a future possibility, imagined by prophets like Isaiah and Jesus, into the present. We can’t succumb to Empire ethics or bow out of the every day politics of our world. We must engage, but as people shaped by a Messiah who came to show us the way of love, of service, compassion, and nonviolence.
So much goes on in the world that is destructive. And at times we passively let it happen by accepting the inevitability. Other times, through our decisions and actions, we even contribute to it. But if we believe Jesus is one example – our example – of the Messiah of which the prophets wrote, then we are called to participate in and change the world, all the while clinging to the ethics of the Realm of God. This is how the world will be transformed. Theologian Walter Wink puts it so well when he writes, “the advent we are waiting for is not an apocalypse but the beginning of human beings again and again as they recommit themselves to bring the Realm of God here.” Amen.
