Sermon for the third Sunday after the Epiphany
It is always encouraging, at my age, when you remember something you were told forty five years ago, whether it is so or not! And I have just such a memory, all the way back to seminary, this morning, having to do with our Gospel passage. And the word I remember is ‘vengeance.’ And no, I am not going anywhere near contemporary American politics!
The story goes like this. Jesus is at the very outset of his ministry, after his baptism in the Jordan and the Holy Spirit, which amounted to his commissioning from his Father. Now he heads back home to preach to his family, and each of us can imagine how easy that is going to be! The passage for the Sabbath in the Nazareth synagogue happens to be the sixty first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, which is as promising an option as one can imagine. It is the perfect basis for the calling I just mentioned. The Holy Spirit has sent the prophet, and his mission is to proclaim the ‘good news’, the Gospel, which means the announcement that God himself is come to his subjects. And what does that arrival portend? Healing and liberation, in every dimension we can imagine. Personal pain, generational trauma, the Romans, past guilt and future death- resolved by God’s own act. As good as an inaugural as possible.
Jesus goes on further to describe this Gospel in an assortment of ways- it will be the Jubilee, what he calls the ‘year of the Lord. ‘ it will be the end of mourning, of what Jews would later call ‘sitting kaddish.’ Our lives will be like good trees by the river, as in the very first Psalm. The long years of devastation, the exile, repaired. Food aplenty. A new dispensation in which the whole nation shall be priestly (anticipating the great passage about Church in Peter’s first letter).
One way to preach is to find the pebble in the shoe, or better yet in the oyster- what in this passage raises an issue? How does that irritation, that question, turn to insight? Luke 4 tells us of Jesus’ first sermon, on this optimal text of Isaiah 61. But things start to go sour when they grumble, ‘isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ who do you think you are? A few verses later things have gone way off the rails, with the congregation ready to throw him off a cliff- now that is a sermon gone wrong. Why? Because Jesus offers a short bible study, focusing on two noted and blessed Gentiles, first the widow of Zarephath, who took Elijah in, and second the leper Naaman, a general in the invading Syrian army, whom Elisha healed. The blessed outsider and the recent convert, set the congregation’s teeth on edge. What are we chopped liver?
All of which takes us back to the word ‘vengeance.’ You see Jesus’ text from Isaiah followed up ‘the acceptable year’ with the ‘day of vengeance of our God.’ But when Jesus preaches on that passage, he emphasizes the first, and leaves the second out for the time being. Apparently the audience liked that revenge on their pagan neighbors part, only to have rabbi Jesus rub salt in the wound with his subsequent praise of famous Gentiles.
Now the great thing about the word of God is that in narrating the ‘then’ it addresses the same Word, to us, now. We are the congregation, the irony being we are most all Gentiles ourselves, though we are no different, a tough hometown audience, who like our mercy laced with a little revenge as well, who, when it comes to hearing about pure grace, have an equally hard time taking ‘Yes’ for an answer. Here I am reminded of the joke about the new priest also giving his first sermon, which the congregation loves. Next Sunday he stands up and delivers the very same sermon- Ok, it was good, maybe he’s busy moving in…Third week, same sermon word for word. The Senior warden sidles up to him and says ‘Father, you gave the same sermon three times in a row.’ And He replies,’ I did, because they haven't done what I told them yet!’ that’s us, like Jesus’ relatives in the Nazareth synagogue, resistant to the shock of a message of grace, so against the grain of our world, which is why you and I come Sunday by Sunday until forgiveness sinks in, worried as we are that if it’s free, there must be a catch.
Well that’s my memory of New Testament class long ago, of the Gospel on the one hand, and us become the audience before the new hometown rabbi. But I want to add a postscript. For in the bible some ideas are postdated. They seem to be rejected, but in fact come back into play in dramatic new ways. Law, justification, Messiah, kingdom of God, and more, they all come back into play for the new Israel in relation to the risen Jesus. So let us think a little harder about God’s victory over the Gentiles` We were reminded at Epiphany in Psalm 72 that the Messiah would rule the nations, as they brought tribute; that is what the gold, frankincense, and myrrh were. What kind of empire is this, what kind of triumph over the now subject nations? Similarly Paul tells us that the Gentile converts, us, are in a triumphal procession, comparable to the kind of spectacle which Caesar would have stage through the Roman streets, with representatives of the captive nations paraded through the streets. I have in mind here II Corinthians 2,: “But thanks be to God,” declares Paul, “who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ.’ (The aroma being the incense used in processions to mask the stench of a Roman street!) The New Testament is so adept at turning things on their heads- we are the captives, of hope says the Psalmist, captives stolen from the evil one, as if from Azkaban in a Harry Potter novel. Our liturgical procession itself is meant to be just such a celebration of the Gentiles now in the possession of the Messiah. In short, vengeance as anger is in the new dispensation to be gone, but not the victory over the nations itself. Nor are we to jettison this image of being taken over, for our own individual choices are not the point, however much we worship such, but rather the one who has triumphed, who comes in mercy as well as power, whose arrival is marked by the proclamation of the Jubilee, first in our hearts, in time in His world which is already God’s. Amen.
