Malachi 3:1-4 Luke 1:68-79 (for the Psalm) Philippians 1:3-11 Luke 3:1-6
Between the years 605
and 538 BC several waves of Jewish citizens were exiled to Babylon and even
though they returned 70 years later, they remained servants of foreign
overlords for many years. First the Persians, and then the Greeks and the
Syrians…until a group of men rose up against the tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes,
and managed to win back a fairly stable quasi-independence for Judah.
Out of this group
a new dynasty arose called the Hasmoneans who ruled as both High Priests and as
“Kings”. For a while, things seemed to go well, until a struggle for power
between two brothers drew the attention of Pompey who, under the guise of a
willingness to arbitrate the difficulties, once more brought the Jews under a
foreign power, this time Rome. It is also at this time that an Edomite advisor
to the puppet king by the name of Antipater began to seek powerful positions
for his sons, one of whom later became known as Herod the Great.
Now although this
is a complicated yet fascinating history, it does give us a brief glimpse of
the backdrop behind the opening chapters of the New Testament. Like the other
empires before them, Rome proved to be harsh and demanding taskmasters and the
paranoid Edomite King Herod who ruled with an iron fist was thoroughly disliked
by many orthodox Jews. As the High Priests were chosen and controlled by Rome
compromise was the order of the day, so a group of priests left the Temple and
started their own strict religious community…they are known to us as the
Essenes and they lived in an area called Qumran.
Another group
known as the Zealots began guerrilla warfare against the Romans and against any
Jewish collaborators like the despised tax collectors. Rumours of would-be
Messiahs were commonplace, but those who dared to gather a following quickly
met with a rather sticky end…crucified patriots dotted the landscape as a
warning to anyone who might entertain thoughts of liberation and independence.
Enter in - onto this volatile and unstable stage – a
voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the Way of the Lord!”
Can you imagine
the excited expectation of the people? Their Lord was coming and they had to be
ready to meet Him. One of the first times this call for national preparatory
repentance and ritual cleansing was heard was during the time of the Exodus.
The Israelite slaves had been delivered from bondage and had gathered at the
foot of the Mountain of God, Mount Sinai. Moses instructed the people to wash
themselves and their clothes in anticipation for the Lord’s arrival three days
later. Surely the connection between this call of Moses and John’s message of
repentance and ritual cleansing in preparation for the arrival of the Lord
would not have gone unnoticed. God was about to show up! Something big was
going on here! Surely nothing short of another deliverance!
Add to this the
fact that John was the first prophet to break the four hundred year’s Divine
silence and that he was baptising in the river Jordan right where Joshua led
the people into the Promised Land, and you can understand why people flocked to
hear him and to be baptised by him! An expectation of deliverance was in the
air…conquest, the restoration of the geo-political kingdom of Israel, the
reconstitution of Israel as an independent nation!
Of course,
deliverance did come, but not quite the way the Jews expected.
Now the message of
John the Baptists was quite simple: in order for the Holy God of Israel to come
to the rescue of His people, the people had to be prepared…they had to be
ready. Israel had become corrupt under the rule of Herod and the Sadducees, the
two main collaborators with Rome…the Zealots had blood on their hands…so, purification
and cleansing was necessary. Indeed, the Lord whom they sought would suddenly come
to His Temple and He would cleanse it in a fury of righteous indignation
because the Temple of Herod and the Sadducees resembled the pagan temples of
the day with the buying and selling of trinkets and items for religious use…and
the teaching of the Scriptures had been corrupted because of tradition and hunger
for political power…consequently, many of the lay folk were largely biblically
illiterate….hmm, sounds like some churches I have visited in the past.
But perhaps that’s
just the point of retelling this story every year during the Advent season. The
call for preparatory soul cleansing is still needed today; in fact it is needed
everyday if we are to finish our spiritual journey well. Sir Francis Drake, the
sixteenth century sailor who sailed around the globe, once said that it was not
the beginning of the work that mattered, but rather the finishing that yielded
the true glory. Paul basically said the same thing in our Epistle reading for
today. The Christian journey is one that does not end with a profession of
faith…that is only the beginning…there is a journey ahead that one must walk
with God to the very end. And thanks be to God, we don’t have to do this on our
own steam…He is the one who began that good work in us and He is the one who
will bring it to completion.
The church in
Philippi, situated in northern Greece, was one of the first to hear the Gospel
through the missionary work of the Apostle Paul. Paul had of course moved on to
establish other churches elsewhere and was, at the time of writing this letter,
in prison because of his missionary work. An he wrote to them because he knew
that their initial response to his message of salvation through faith in Jesus
was only the beginning. Like newborn babes, they had to be fed in order to grow
to maturity. And so he wrote this letter to encourage them to seek a deeper and
more meaningful relationship with the one in whom they claimed to believe.
After having
bolstered their confidence in reminding them that what God begins He always
finishes, Paul also reminded them that they were a people who were dearly loved
both by God and by him. Anyone who has ever had children or worked with
children will tell you that children thrive when they have a sense of security
and when they know they are loved. I don’t believe we ever really move beyond these
basic needs…security and love…and we find both through faith in Jesus.
In the light of this
confident love, Paul prayed for them. Firstly, he prayed that their love would
overflow more and more, and that they would keep on growing in knowledge and
understanding. You see, in Christian thought, the heart and the head are not
separated as some may think. For Christian love to be Christ-like, it must
express itself in knowing and understanding the way life really works in God’s
world. We have to understand what really matters if we are to love as God loves
and if we are to do what God does.
For this reason,
the second thing Paul prayed for was for moral discernment. The world of the
Philippians, like our modern day world, was filled with all sort of moral
issues that were not always easy to label as either good or bad…sometimes
things were unclear or the fine line between right and wrong was blurred
because of cultural biases or other reasons. After all, none of us are ever
truly objective. It is the knowledge of
God and His ways and an understanding of His Word that helps us make difficult
decisions in life. And that is something we only learn over time as we humbly
allow His Word and His Spirit to direct us on a daily basis.
But notice the
reason for this prayer for moral discernment. It was so that they might live
pure and blameless lives until our Lord’s return.
This statement
echoes the voice crying in the wilderness. John the Baptist’s world, Paul’s
world, and our world was and still is morally corrupt because it is spiritually
bankrupt. And as the faithful in John’s time anticipated the coming of the Lord
so we too anticipate the return of our Lord. But this anticipation is never passive…John
was called to prepare the way of the Lord by instructing the people to cleanse
themselves so that they might live pure and holy lives. We are called to do the
same…we are cleansed in Christ and now we need to continuously be filled with
the fruit of that salvation – that righteous character that is produced in our
lives by the finished and yet continuing work of Jesus…who, as we have already
seen, will continue the work He began in us until it is finally finished on the
Day when He returns.
Two comings…two
anticipatory periods…two preparatory periods…both instructing us to strive
towards maturity in our new identity as followers of Jesus.
Now, I believe the
Eucharist serves to remind us of these two periods. In 1 Corinthians 11:26 Paul
tells us that every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we are
announcing both our Lord’s death as well as His return….His 1st
Coming as well as His 2nd Coming. As such, through this sacrament,
our voices unite with the voice of the one crying in the wilderness. Prepare
the way for the Lord’s coming…
© Johannes W H van
der Bijl III 2018-12-04
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