“Who is it That is Born? Jesus as Prophet, Church as Prophetic”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Text: Matthew 13:53-58, 21:9-11
For those of you here last Sunday, I introduced that very old biblical image of the great feast in heaven, the great feast at which all the saints would appear, called by the Messiah, a feast that would be joyful and would be powerful. I want to take us to that feast again, and I want us to have an image of one table being set at this great feast. You know how you go to corporate events and there are tables and centrepieces with the name of a company or organization. Well, picture this: There is a table where the sign in the middle says “Prophets” and sitting around this table are all the great prophets of the Old Testament.
Can you imagine the conversation at that table in Heaven? Needless to say, Moses would start the conversation. “Have you any idea,” he would say, “how difficult it was to deal with the people as I got them out of Egypt, and how we wandered in the wilderness?”
And Isaiah would say, “That is nothing! I had to deal with the four kings of Judah. They had no idea how to worship. They had no idea how to be holy. They didn't practice righteousness or justice. Huh, you don't know anything!”
And Amos would say, “Oh, you don't know anything either! I mean, I had to put up with King Amaziah who wanted to silence me and prevent me from being a prophet. I had a terrible time with the King! You have no idea how bad things were!”
And Jonah would say, “You guys have seen nothing! I ended up in the belly of a whale for three days for crying out loud, and I did all that, and then had to go to Nineveh to proclaim the Word of God! You guys have no idea how bad it was!”
I can imagine this conversation going around the table hour after hour as the prophets compared notes of all the different things that they had encountered and all the rejection they had faced.
But for all of them at this table there is one thing they shared and that was that in their hearts and lives they wanted just one thing, and that was that the nation of Israel and Judah to know the will and the way and the word of the Lord. Whether it was out in the wilderness for 40 years, in exile in another country, having been oppressed by the Babylonians, in power and in glory when Israel was the dominant military and economic force, or if the nation had been subjugated by the Greeks and then by the Romans, it doesn't matter. They all shared one common faith: they had a passion for their nation and that the nation would know the will and the way and the word of the Lord.
If there was anything that characterized these prophets, as different and diverse as they were in time and in place, it was that they really wanted Israel and Judah to come home. They wanted them to know the will and the way and the word of God. Regardless of what was going on in the nation, they wanted the people to find a place in the heart and in the life of God. Even though these prophets seem very strange to us in our time, their message is still very powerful and engaging. They wanted people to come home to God.
I thought about the prophets this week, I thought about them when I visited a homeless shelter. As many of you know, during this time of the year I go around to the shelters to find out what their needs are, and to see if Timothy Eaton Church can help them. I went into one shelter unannounced, although I know the director quite well. I started to talk to some of the people there.
There was one man in particular who seemed to engage me and I engaged him. Together, we walked over to the coffee cart that was in the corner of the hall, and struck up a conversation. The man looked worse for wear. It was obvious from the conversation that he was originally from northern Manitoba. He was a First Nation's person. As I looked at him, it was obvious that he had a hard life. There were scars on his face. There were scars on his hands. There was a look of sadness in his eyes. And, when I looked at my own hands when we shook hands, I couldn't help but think how lily-white mine were, how soft and unscarred compared with his rough and knobbly hands.
We started to talk about why he was there and how long he had been in Toronto, and the fact that he had left home in northern Manitoba a long time ago. We came around to the question that I ask a lot of people: “What do you really want for Christmas?”
He paused, and he just looked around the shelter, and then he said with a sign and a sigh of resignation, “Well I guess what I would really like to do is to go home. I'd like to go home.”
I looked at him, and I said, “I might be able to help you to go home.”
And he said, “Sure you will!”
He looked forlorn, and I started to leave, and I felt sad.
I knew that more than anything else here was a man who wanted one thing: to go home. It was obvious that in his life, clearly home had not been a friendly place for him. It must have been fraught with all manner of difficulties, and that was the reason why he was in Toronto, but still, deep down, home is where he wanted to be. And then, I thought of Jesus. I thought that Jesus also was a prophet, and that Jesus was like the prophets of the Old Testament, and that he too wanted people to come home, not just in a physical sense, back to Judah or Israel or Zion or Bethel, he wanted them to come home to the God who had made them in the first place.
That is why the New Testament talks about Jesus in three ways that I am going to look at in the next three weeks, as Prophet, Priest, and King, known in theology as the “munus triplex” - the three offices in Christ's life. If you don't know much about Jesus Christ, then by my talking about him this morning as prophet you might get an insight. And, if you know a great deal about Jesus Christ, then maybe it will deepen your understanding of the prophetic role of Christ, for Jesus is carrying on the ministry of Isaiah and Amos and Micah and Elijah and Jeremiah and Hosea, and in the New Testament, they call him “Prophet.”
In the Book of Hebrews, it is said that Jesus is “the Son of God, who is a prophet.” Why? It is because God had spoken first through the prophets of the Old Testament, but now, has spoken through his Son. He is considered to be, in the Gospel of Luke, “a prophet, mighty in words and deeds.” But there are other moments when he is described as a prophet, as when he comes forward on Palm Sunday.
In today's passages there is this word “prophet” the one that “a prophet hath no honour in his home,” and the other “the prophet who rides into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey.” Jesus was seen as a prophet, maybe the next Elijah, but definitely in the line of the prophets.
The ministry of Jesus then was to bring the world home. The ministry of Jesus was to continue the word and the will and the way of the prophets. I couldn't help but think of Jesus when I saw that man in the shelter. I thought “I wonder if the man in the shelter knows and fully understands the power and the prophetic ministry of Jesus?” for Jesus had all the characteristics of the Old Testament prophets.
The first characteristic is the rejection. Jesus said, “A prophet hath no honour in their own home.” Jesus had gone to Galilee to perform miracles and healings, and to bring the Word of God. People said, “But isn't that the son of Mary, and isn't that the son of the carpenter? I mean, we know his brothers and sisters. There is no way that he can be the prophet! There is no way that he can be the great, new voice for God!” So Jesus, feeling the rejection of the crowds, turned away, and Matthew records that he performed no miracles there, because they didn't believe.
He wandered away just like the prophets. There is a voice in the wilderness crying. “Prepare a way in the wilderness for the Lord,” says Isaiah, knowing that a wilderness is what he would experience. John the Baptist, in preparing the way for Jesus, again a prophet, talks about the wilderness. The rejection of the prophets was an integral part of their lives. It was part of their way. Even when they came to their own people, it was their own people who very often let them down. The place where they and the Word of God that they were supposed to bring should be at home was the place where they felt rejection, just like the man in the shelter.
I was reading an account of a football match, as we call it, that was played in 1993 in England - the League Cup Final. It was between two well known teams: Arsenal and Sheffield Wembley. In the game, it was a very close match and finally in the last minute a man called Steve Morrow, an unlikely player, scored the winning goal for Arsenal. Everyone went mad! His captain, Tony Adams, and members of the team all went and picked him up on their shoulders. They started carrying him around Wembley pitch.
And then, they threw him up in the air out of celebration, but there was only one problem… they didn't catch him on his way down! He broke his arm in three places, he had a concussion, he couldn't play the rest of the season, he didn't get to play in any of the European finals, all because his own had tossed him up when things were good, but on his way down they weren't there for him. I thought “What an image this is of what happens to the prophets!”
When things are high and good and glorious on their way up, all arms are outstretched in praise of the prophet, but on the way down, when the prophet has said something hard to say or something to correct the people, they were nowhere to be found. Why? Why the rejection of the prophets? Why the rejection of Jesus? Surely, if they saw in the prophets and in Christ the will and the way and the word of God, they would have embraced it; but no, because the word of humanity is not the Word of God.
The word of humanity does not always accept the holiness and the righteousness and the morality and the peace and the justice of the Word of God. It wants something different. Often, the word of humanity, as we have seen this week, can be sadistic and cruel. It can torture, it can kill, it can be neglectful, it can be unjust, it can follow sexual promiscuity, it follows lust and the will to power, and it wants wealth above grace.
The word of humanity does not always fall in line with the Word of God. And when the will and the way and the word of God is spoken and those who speak it are rejected, we realize then why the Cross is the ultimate symbol of the prophetic ministry of Jesus. It is the ultimate word about humanity, which says “No” and the ultimate word of God, which says “Yes” because even if humanity rejected the will and the way of God, the prophet Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself for the world.
I think that the church that follows in the path of Christ, and follows in line with the prophets, must never try to seek the popularity of the word of humanity, but must maintain the faithfulness to the will and the way and the word of the living God. It is not always easy, but it is the right path.
I don't want to be negative, for the prophets also had another characteristic: they were always for the people. The prophets, even when they denounced Israel for its inequities and its injustices and its immoralities, were always doing it out of love, always wanting it to come home, not to be lost and wandering away. The prophets were always for the people. Although there were many in power and many who spoke the voice of the culture that could not stand them for it, still they did what they did for the sake of bringing the nation home to God.
Is that not the ministry of Jesus? The very rejection of Jesus by his own people and village enabled him to expand the covenant by going to other people and other places and bring them in. Is that not what the story of the Good Samaritan is all about? Is that not what the healing of the slave of the Centurion was all about last week? Is that not what happens to the woman who was at the well?
Was not the grace of Jesus and the power of Jesus to bring those who were outside the covenant in, and not in any way to diminish the will or the word of God, not to compromise the truth of that, but to bring them home and that living in that way and word they might have life. Is that not the ministry of the Church? Is that not the prophetic ministry of the Church? I think it is! It is always for others. It is always for the world. It is always for the bringing home of those who are not there already.
There is one other ingredient and characteristic of the prophets that really strikes me, and that is that they were blessed for the task. The prophets did not act on their own, speak on their own, or perform great deeds on their own, any more than Jesus did. Listen to this magnificent passage at the beginning of Isaiah in Chapter 61, way on, but nevertheless the beginning of a key moment in his ministry. This is what Second Isaiah says:
The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom from the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners to proclaim the ear of the Lord's favour.
It is no coincidence that in the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he was in the Temple, he read that very passage, for Jesus knew, as did Isaiah, that it is the Spirit's power that animates their message. It is the Spirit's power that moves them to do what they do. It is the Spirit's power that brings people home. And, had they not the Spirit's power, and had Jesus when he was baptized not been blessed by the Holy Spirit, then even the greatness of the Son of God would not have been able to perform the miracles that he did. It is the Spirit that makes sense of the will and the way and the word of God.
You know, Christmas is always, I think, children's time. The older I get, the more I realize that really the majesty of Christmas is in the eyes of children. Maybe the older I get, the more cynical I become, and I need to look at Christmas again through the eyes of children.
I was reading a wonderful story about a grandfather who was visiting his family for Christmas. As he walked by his granddaughter's bedroom, she was kneeling next to the bed and she was praying fervently. He listened carefully, and she was praying the alphabet, “A, B, C, D.....W, X, Y, Z. Amen.”
He asked her, “Dear, what on earth are you doing? What are you praying?”
She looked at him and she said, “Granddad, I have no idea what to say to God, so I just thought that if I gave him all the letters, he could put them together and they would have some meaning.”
So often, we do not know what to say, just like the prophets did not know what to say. There were times that even Jesus was stuck for words. When he saw inequities or saw immorality or when he was challenged, but it is the Spirit and the power of the Spirit that gives meaning to the way and will and the word of God.
When I started to leave that shelter, but just before I got to the door, I turned around. I realized I just couldn't leave that conversation with that man the way it was left. I went back to him and I said, “I will make sure that you will get home for Christmas. Trust me. I am going to promise to do that for you, but I want you to promise something to me, and that is that I know it is going to be difficult to go home, and I know that when you go home you are going to face things that you've left undone, and I am going to pray that when you go home you will have the courage to put those things right. Will you promise that to me?”
And he said, “Yes, I will.”
Over the last 48 hours, we have found the means and the way to get him home for Christmas, and I think that the prophets knew that it is not always easy to go home, and that it is not always easy to walk in the will and way and the word of the Lord. Jesus knew that, but that was still what he wanted to say, and that is what he wanted to convey, and that is why he was facing rejection, and that is why the Christ Child came: to be a prophet, to bring the whole world back home to God through the will and the way and the word of God. Amen